Rickyb

Have a Segar Lap with Microsoft 7 Pro for 1 year and all it wants is to now is to down load updates and it cannot process the updates. This is getting to be a daily idiotic nightmare! Any suggestions?

jenny Loc: in hiding:)

Win10 is no picnic either of course.

Mac Loc: Pittsburgh, Philadelphia now Hernando Co. Fl.

MacBook Pro.

imagemeister Loc: mid east Florida

I Don't have that problem with XP .....

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Disable automatic updates under windows 7 (in control panel). The alternative is to update to Windows 10 (where you actually have less control over updates without some effort), but the free update period is over unless you already have the binaries or can get an exemption for special needs.

James56 Loc: Nashville, Tennessee

I don't have that problem with Windows 7 Pro...I do get updates, and they install just fine.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

Win 7 had a lot of updates over the years, I know it often took a few hours a day over 3 days to load them all after I had to reformat and reload our son's computer about 4 times in a little over a year. It was so messed up I just couldn't be bothered to trace and fix each problem. Plus loaded with malware. He is special needs (25 but mental age 5, on a good day) and would click on anything, with the results you would expect, often turning off the protection I had on the machine. Protection that worked on the family's other three machines just fine. I finally convinced my wife to let me take his computer off line and keep the wifi attachment in my desk.

Since you have had yours for 1 year and it is Win 7 I would venture that it had not been updated like it should be and is now trying to do so. Many of the updates were ones that depended on previous updates being there to download and install. It is possible a few of the key downloads are missing so it downloaded, tries to install, fails on some or all of them and then downloads and starts over the next time it is online. A couple of times his computer failed to down load or install many updates for weeks at a time. I kept tracing all the error messages and would usually find in the end that a key update and setting was missing and when that one update was loaded all by itself and the settings were then corrected it would load and install all those updates. Then later it would happen again and I had to go through it all again. Finally (just before switching the machine to Win 10) I got all of them loaded and installed. Then I convinced my wife to let me remove the wifi and keep it. Now once a month I put the wifi back, spend a few hours catching up on updates etc. To keep him from "helping" I sit in front of the computer and read a book in between giving it commands, rebooting etc.
Since we haven't had any computers on Win 7 for over a year I don't know how many updates there have been. But I will bet it is a lot of little things and a few key ones that have to be installed before bunches of the others will load.

Keldon Loc: Yukon, B.C.

I've never had a single issue with Windows 10. It works flawlessly.

blackest Loc: Ireland

You might find this useful

http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php

Its free and that and gparted are 2 great tools. If you have a fully working system now, just use this tool (boot from the cd /usb/dvd which ever you go for) and copy the hard drive partitions (usually an external hard drive). Once you have the image if/when the hard drive gets trashed just restore that image. you can shrink the partition to a little over what is being used then clone that then resize it back to full size. This is faster as you are not writing out empty blocks. resizing back up takes around a minute. Splitting the hard drive into two partitions is a good way to go to, programs on a smaller partition, data on the larger. That way you only need to restore the operating system and the data partition can stay as it is.

If you don't have a data partition just resize the current os partition create a new partition in the empty space and then copy the data from the os partition to the new data partition. if there isn't enough space to do it in one go you can just resize again.

You can also just put a linux partition on the external drive and have it bootable , but just the live cd will do for now.
Trust me having an image to restore which already has all or at least most of the windows updates, will save you days of work. If you install new updates or software you can just make a fresh image. No more digging up drivers each time you reinstall either. Cloning back would take say 5 minutes to get started and then the actual copying could take 15 minutes an hour depending on size but you don't need to watch it.

If there is space on the internal hard drive you can store the osimage partition as an image on the data partition.

I used to be the tech for an internet cafe where every machine was different and restoring the image was a weekly occurrence, could have 20 machines restored in around 30 minutes.

dpullum Loc: Tampa Florida

Yes, "Windows 10. It works flawlessly" I was resistant at first, and my W-8 was complete bust... would not work and then reverted back to my 7 premium home... [ lowest 7 you could get! why miss name, humph] but when W-10 came along I did my backup drive.

To be safe I removed the backup disk and then did W-10 on my W-7 on one HD... worked fine and still does work fine. After customizing... love it.

Still have Me, Vista, and 8 disks that MS should give me $ back... but giving me 10 for free soothes me a bit. Gosh W-1.1 and the "Blue Screen of Death" I recall it well.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

Same here. On two different computers in fact.

therwol Loc: USA

When Windows can't install updates, you may get an error message. Type in any error message word for word into Google and see what comes up. You will probably get potential solutions to the problem, though they are often technical. As a last resort, reinstall Windows after backing up all of your important files because they will be wiped out in a fresh install. Use something like an external hard drive. If you restore your computer using a manufacturer's backup disk or partition, you won't need the drivers to your hardware. If you use a Windows disc, Windows may or may not have the drivers for all of your hardware, and you'll have to find them and download them. If you have system restore running, you can sometimes restore your computer to a time before you had a problem and then start over with the updates. This sometimes fixes something that has become corrupted. Lastly, a fresh install of Windows will likely be missing hundreds of updates, and getting them downloaded and installed can take many hours. I always leave Windows Update running overnight after a fresh install.

Szalajj Loc: Salem, NH

I'm going to throw in another fact.

The Windows 7 updates are hardware hogs.

If your hard drive isn't large enough, and sufficient space wasn't allocated for your operating system, then no matter what you do, the Windows 7 updates are going to fail to install.

I have a laptop and a desktop that are virtually very expensive paperweights at this point because the hard drives ran out of allocated space for Windows 7 updates.

I had to upgrade to a newer laptop with a much larger hard drive and had the allocated space for the operating system expanded way beyond the normal size to allow for future updates to the operating system. I'm running Windows 10 on the new laptop.

therwol Loc: USA

True, but it isn't so very hard to upgrade a hard drive. I have a 10 year old Dell D530 that was delivered with a 60 gig hard drive. I put a 750 gig Seagate hybrid drive in it and installed Windows 7 separately on two partitions and upgraded both to Windows 10, (32 and 64 bit). It runs fine, but it's too slow for video editing, and it maxes out at 4 gigs of RAM. Okay, that's complicated for most people. You can clone an existing hard drive and restore it to a larger one. Look at the free Macrium software for this task.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

What you wrote is like going to a mechanic and telling him something is wrong. Or a doctor and saying you don't feel well.

If you provide specifics about the machine configuration, how much free space you have on your system drive, how fast your internet connection is, any error messages that have come up for failed installs.

Many of the updates to 7 at this point are for security. XP doesn't have the problem because Microsoft suspended support (and security updates) on April 8, 2014, so of course updates won't cause any problems, but system vulnerabilities might. Luckily no one really uses it any more.

Sager is a decent computer - I have a number of students using them, and they are fine. I support users on Win7, 8 and 10. Win8 was a mistake, but 10 is very good, more secure than any OS ever published by MS and it is free.

For the life of me I will never understand how a rather simple solution can be resolved by tossing the computer in the garbage and running out and spending $2000 on a completely different (and probably less capable) computer platform. That just makes no sense at all. Ever.

I suspect you may not have a large enough system drive, not enough ram, or a very slow internet connection - one or more of the above - which is the cause of many failed updated installs.