How to Restart Windows Update Service in Windows 7?

I'm running into an issue with Windows Update on Windows 7 Professional. I am totally up to date in Windows Updates as of last week, but discovered this issue [today] during my Sunday morning PC maintenance ritual. In CONTROL PANEL -> SYSTEM & SECURITY -> Windows Update, when I select "Check for Updates", I get a pop-up stating:

"Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service is not running. You may need to restart your computer."

I've re-started several times, checked that the service hadn't been disabled at start up, and I've googled extensively on the topic - but have come up with nothing. I know there must be some way to start the service from the cmd line, and I would like to know how to get the service to start at boot.

Please let me know if I have left any details out that may aid in formulating a response. Any of the community's excellent insights would be greatly appreciated!

You can try stopping and restarting Windows Update Service (wuauserv). Open a command line window (run as administrator) and enter the following lines:

net stop wuauserv  
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\wups2.dll  
net start wuauserv  

If that does not help, try Microsoft's Fix It service to reset your Windows Update Components: How do I reset Windows Update components?

I found this webpage and that fixed it in two minutes.

The first thing to do is to stop the Windows Update service on your Windows 7 machine. You can do this by going to Start and typing in services.msc in the search box.

Next, press Enter and the Windows Services dialog will appear. Now scroll down until you see the Windows Update service, right-click on it and choose Stop.

Now that the Windows Update service has been disabled, you need to go to the following folder and delete all the files and folders inside of it:

C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\

Once you have deleted everything, go back to the Services dialog and right-click on the Windows Update service and choose Start. All the files and folders will be re-created and hopefully you can start downloading updates for your PC.

I sent my laptop into HP to get fixed and it was re-imaged or set to factory new when it came back to me. I bought it in 2012, now its 2013 and thus the computer was still thinking it was in 2012 after starting up for the first time. I changed time and date to the current 2013 date and then tried to get updates and this time it worked.