Why won’t WordPress on localhost find updates?

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I use XAMPP myself, but WAMP isn’t much different.

I’ll bet you have not enabled the curl module. WordPress can use other methods (streams and fsockopen) as a fallback, but these may be disabled by default as well in a stock install. Curl is preferred and easy to enable.

  1. Close WAMP
  2. Go your the \bin\php\version directory in WAMP
  3. Edit the php.ini, and uncomment the line that reads extension=php_curl.dll
  4. Do the same thing in \bin\Apache\version\bin\
  5. Save and restart WAMP.

Edit: WAMP may also have an easier way to do this through the graphical interface. Look for “PHP extensions” and “php_curl” and make sure it is enabled.