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Home > Windows XP Common Issues > The Windows Update Service is unavailable
November 8, 2009

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'The Windows Update Service is unavailable'
Automatic update is not functional and shown not available in System properties > Automatic Update tab

System Properties - service

This usually occurs because a utility designed to stop Windows XP services which communicate data to Microsoft in order to do their job (i.e. polling for available updates) has been used on the machine.
The first thing to check in this case would be to go to Start > run and type services.msc
Scroll down to automatic updates and double click on it, ensure the start-up type is automatic and the service is started. Then view the automatic update tab in system properties again. 99.9% of the time this is the cause, if you have an issue starting the service you may want to try going to start > run and entering sfc /scannow

services.msc - automatic update service properties

 
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