I have never Used win8, or Defender, so using your error message “The service couldn’t be started. This operation returned because the timeout period expired.” with an error code of 0x800705b4. I did a google search and got many hits, the first from answers.microsoft.com.
Hopefully one of those will help.
Hi,
Thanks for having a look. I had done a similar search. Most responses to the question seem to revolve around running Windows Update which doesn’t work on my machine and was the start of this series of issues. I’ve tried whatever other solutions I can find but not having any luck so far.
This sounds like a corrupt OS. see if this helps fix the corruption.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-do-i-fix-corrupted-files-on-windows-81/9580a94f-37dc-4393-b83d-3012789aef17
Something has definitely gone wrong somewhere in the system!
I have tried a few of the things that are in that link and not had any success. I don’t have my notes in front of me at the moment but I do recall trying various versions of DISM. I think I did try refreshing but that it refused… Sorry, that’s very vague but I’ll need to have a look at it when I’m feeling more awake than I do now.
Thanks for the suggestion.