Windows 7 Update or lack of it in this case!

[#1]

I have a small Netbook, the one I was going to install Mint on but as it refuses to boot from any device other than the internal disk, I'm giving up on it, I have better things to do. Anyway, Windows was last updated on 11th Jan 2014, and has spent over two hours 'Checking for Updates' and has made no obvious progress, if it had a face I'd have punched it by now. Is there anything I can do to move things along?

[#2]

Windows update will take "forever" because you have not done it.... ( a kind of punishment for you  ! ! ! ! )... just start the update procedure... and leave it running... 24 hours if needed... even then.. it may not have "found" them all.....  just leave it... the progress bar does not (usually) show any activity until it has found them all...
After you have them all listed    suggest you update ( say ) 15 at a time.... You will need to reboot after each 15, but... it will , hopefully, prevent it "hanging" while it waits for a reboot, before updating an update... if you follow that... and you will never get any updates done..
be aware of KB3035583 .... as this is the "nag" update that puts the icon on your machine....  best thing to do, ( if you don`t want Win 10... and believe me,... you don`t really NEED it ).. is to HIDE UPDATE...

[#3]

OK, sounds like a plan, I'll leave it to 'cook' and see what happens.

[#4]

As you haven't mentioned it, Is your BIOS boot setting on USB as the primary boot device?
What conversion program did you use to set up the USB boot device (unetbootin/ others)?
After all the testing I done on different distro's I found that LXDE/Deb was the quickest/ best for the hardware (Acer Aspire One)
I also have a netbook which has Peppermint 5 on it (LXDE/Deb) linux derivative.

[#5]

It doesn't offer that specific option but as I don't have a USB large enough for the distro I won't know.
This is the other thread I started.
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,146367.0.html
But to be honest for the moment it's moot, as the Netbook eventually found 113 updates and is installing some of them now. So at least progress is being made.
If the truth be told I'd rather have Arch Linux (CLI only) on it as that is my preferred Linux, but the software I want to install I know runs on Mint / Windows so I don't want to rock the boat with a bleeding edge Arch Install.
I do have an Agility 3 SSD I could install in the Netbook, but I need the ruddy thing to boot from (USB) CD/DVD first! This maybe a task for the future.

[#6]

Ok, good luck with the updates!
Have you checked to see if there are any bios firmware updates for you netbook?
A firmware update may/ may not unlock bios settings dependant on manufacturer.
Last year I installed a 120Gb Corsair SSD into the netbook and upgraded the DDR3 RAM to 2Gb from 1Gb and installed linux.
Having this netbook around has been/ is reliable fallback for windows failures.

[#7]

Windows updates? I must say I've never bothered with them since around 13 years ago!
I had a win98SE machine... spent hours installing the updates (via 56k modem) only for it then to become unbootable.
WinME was a vast improvement for stability but again... a couple of updates knocked that off too.
So with WinXP I did SP2 and that was it - it's clearly been tried and tested by MS and that was all I was interested in.
I now use 7Pro... (oh and 7HP on a previous emachine) and I've just never bothered with any updates. I can't really say I've noticed anything bad happen for it either. The only slight snag was when I got this machine I didn't know auto updates were turned on... of course it downloaded one, installed it, forced me to reboot and then disabled my desktop widget for the weather (and clipboard manager). I wasn't happy about that. I didn't even get a choice as to whether I wanted it installed or not (or an explanation of what it would remove) and thus for me, yet again an update caused me hassle and damage to the usability of my system.
In short, I don't do updates unless they're service packs.

[#8]

a lot of the netbooks were setup with uefi bios so that they can only be booted from the fixed disk with the correct licence key in the mbr....
if you want to upgrade yours or change the OS your going to need to get into the bios, as to size of usb stick think outside the box, music players or phones with expandable memory can be used to hold the data not just a standard usb stick

[#9]

@7up....  the reason you lost the weather widget... was because microsoft had been told of a very serious security flaw, that they could not fix,... so they did " you can`t use the widgets" update.. to disable them.. 

[#10]

Yes I've heard about that... but even so it was a widget I liked and a widget I wanted.
The fact that I'm behind two firewalls really should kinda mean that i'm reasonably well protected. Sure a widget might call http but then if thats the case MS should have come up with a better security system - not just disable them forcefully - it's not like anyone has ever managed to sue microsoft yet is it so i don't see why they were so worried - they're not normally!

[#11]

because they couldn't block the service call request the widget made on a regular basis, they realised there were a bunch of bad (hacked) gateways in the wild pointing all the widget service calls o a malicious site which was giving it a ransomware rather than a legit update and they couldn't fix the problem (which means the only way to block it was no internet connection) the problem largely stemmed from it being part of the service set enumerators with elevation privileges and blocking the web traffic for it on a local or remote firewall also blocked all browser traffic, the only answer was to strip it out of the operating system or have to start paying every time someone got hijacked the longer they left it in the wild the greater the risk of a class action suit, they pulled the plug and apart from you hardly anyone else noticed or cared about it/