Windows Prof 7 updates.

[#1]

Hi folks!
My lenovo  E535 laptop told me last evening on shutting off that a batch of updates were downloading. As normal I let them run until the machine shut itself down. Today I powered it up and, as expected, it told me that Windows needed to be Configured and the display indicator circle showed that this was happening. The % of the download got to 100% eventually but nothing happened except that the circle continued to rotate. After 30 minutes of this I thought that I was not going to use the machine and powered it down. I noticed that the machine was unusually warm. I left it for a couple of hours and tried again. This time all went well but the % only got to 35%! and the circle continued to rotate without any change for an hour. So I powered it down again. After lunch a fresh attempt was carried out, all was as before with the 35% indication but now it seemed to have done something right because I got the password request and everything seemed normal.
Have any others had this sort of behavior? It is the first for me and I half wondered whether M$ was playing tricks to get me to install Win 10 (even though it is said to be the best thing since sliced bread AND FREE) which I have no intention to mess with it.
Longer term I plan to escape the clutches of M$ by dual booting with Mint and getting shot of M$ bloat once I have got everything across to the Linux partition.

[#2]

Running W7Professional.... yes.. I have had similar , but not recently.... just doing 13 updates,  so will see what happens... 
Good luck with Mint as replacement to Windows...  Hope you can find all the Linux versions of the Windows progs ... ( however, you will find a lot of windows progs will run under WINE ).. that you have become used to...

[#3]

13 updates done with no problem.......  held off doing the re-boot, until midnite shutdown, and re-booted this morning with no problems...

[#4]

It sound to me is if it is installing Windows 10, but it is billyware so anything's possible. If you have time just leave it on and let it do what it's doing. If it is installing Windows 10 then you can always roll it back within the first 30 mins, sorry days!

[#5]

Thanks guys!
All seem to be OK  latterly yesterday. Today, on powering up, it stuck at getting Windows and got no further. Evenually Lenovo popped up and tried to find start-up problems, it spent 20 minutes "repairing" things but did not stop! It does not let you interfere with this, so in desperation I shut everything down with a long press of the on button. To my surprise it booted up normally and here I am talking to you. There is no evidence of it trying to install Win 10. I only mentioned that because of my well-learned belief in the existance of M$'s dirty tricks department.The moment they startedshouting about the FREE software!!
I welcome your advice re Mint, I will have to relearn Linux.. Years ago I did try a few versions of Ubuntu on an old laptop (I did have an old Dell OptiFlex with XP Professonal which did get a lot of airing on this forum!). Eventually I gave up with the laptop after an update which would only boot up using Grubsafe and no-one knew how to cure it. The laptop then promtly died with a Pent II failure and I bought this laptop. All a bit of a personal disaster I am afraid. I only mentioned W10 because of my distrust of M$ offering anything free.

[#6]

I have been using Mint for about 7 years now, Vista was what pushed me over to Linux full time. The fact that a year old scanner & printer wouldn't work, the network wouldn't wake up on power up etc etc etc.
Depends on what you use your pc for as to whether Linux will work for you. Shutter is a bit jaded as he has a wifi card that needs installed rather than working OOB. That and the fact he wants Linux to be a free version of M$, with all his programs working. If you can use Linux native programs rather than having to use Wine then the experience is much better. Personally I only run 2 programs under Wine, Newsbin & quickpar. Newsbin 'cause I haven't found any other program that I like as much for newsgroups and quickpar for the interface.
But I do also dual boot to game as when I upgraded this pc I couldn't get the graphics card to play nice in Linux. I used W10 since I wasn't going to spend a day installing M$ & countless updates to a new SSD. But the sad fact is that I still hate it when I can't do something that is straightforward in Linux on M$, scan a document .. no scanner driver ... print to pdf no pdf printer installed. etc etc.
I spent about 30 min trying to scan a document to pdf in W7. (download drivers, etc then discover they are crippleware) Rebooted to Mint and had it booted, scanned and sent inside a minute.
I love the fact the normally I can just plug something in and it works, no trawling for drivers from dodgy sites (like sourceforge) with malware as a bonus. On the rare occasion it isn't recognised then someone else has probably discovered how to fit it and shared the results.

[#7]

Quote

Shutter is a bit jaded, cos his wifi card needs installed....

Yup !.. but it isn`t MY fault... I have up todate Dell laptop, and it still needs the wifi installing seperately... ! ...  ( the gripe here, is not so much about the need to install it seperately, but there is no indication/help window that tells you how to go about getting your wifi working, if it does not connect....  to someone who is new to linux, this is (was) a BIG stumbling block, not addressed by the writers of Mint.... )
Issues I had originally with Mint 8, have improved over the years, where you had to get permissions, and write command stuff to get WINE to work with windows progs...
As mentioned in other threads... I like Mint ( have got 17 on a hdd somewhere).. but a just a couple of programs that are based on Windows, will not work with WINE.. and to get the same result using MINT, requires me to use three different programs,  and that is time consuming, when trying to process things quickly.  ( not going into details, cos it is irrelevant, having "been there, done that",..... )
as for wanting Linux to be a FREE M$..... surely that is what it is.....( a FREE O.S. ) ...  and .... that is what all the linux geeks keep going on about,,... how FREE Linux is.....   

[#8]

Free M$ means a FREE M$ WINDOWS not a free OS. Just cause W10 is "free" it isn't FREE. Unless you have an existing install it isn't free, the apps are paid for, even solitaire now.
W10 on my system still needed drivers downloaded (using Mint ;-))
Linux is FREE, but that means that there is no warranty that it will work on your system OOB. It is free to download install on as many devices you want to, no phoning home etc etc.
Mint 17.3 has a new driver app that MAY help with your wifi but I don't have any Broadcom based wifi to test it with.

[#9]

I cant run my games with Mint    so i will stick with win10 

[#10]

Software problems tend to manifest in the same way every time whilst hardware problems can be more erratic in their manifestations.  On that basis you may have a hardware problem.  It might, for example, be the hard disk so read attempts are sometimes failing or files are becoming corrupt.  If Windows spends a long time trying to repair itself then it will be running the check and repair routine on the hard disk ('chkdsk').  That can take a very long time, more than the 20 minutes you gave it.  But presumably it found and repaired your problem file during that time which is why your computer started normally thereafter.
Often, hard disk faults are initially confined to certain areas of the disk.  Therefore if you partition the disk for Linux you may strike lucky, get a good area and Linux will run smoothly.  Or you may not.     

[#11]

I have also been trying to manually update win7 Pro as well, with no luck in the last few days.  It's stuck checking for updates every time I try.
edit I started another attempt when I posted this reply and the patch list window just appeared, what should take 2 minutes took almost 30 minutes, now to see if it works

[#12]

Thank again Guys!
I have taken Linux Format since my Ubuntu days, they have done a thorough job covering dual booting with M$.  which I will explore when I have time. Their most recent only covers Win10 so I will ignore that and review their earlier effort where they talk about Win7 & 8. Because my laptop is the only computer that works, I might try to afford a desktop machine to replace my old Dell while there seem to be quite a lot of cut-price offerings with Win 7 on them. This would allow me to to duplicate the laptop system as a total back-up. Time and pocket might just manage that.

[#13]

Further to my last..has anyone helpful thoughts on my idea about replacement desktop? I have a good spare geniusnet.com keyboard and a spare Benq GL955 flat screen display available. Some Amazon offerings are lenovo built, others are refurbs made by several sources.

[#14]

Check out Aria as well, they often have good deals on units only.

[#15]

@ HB
Aria site is interesting. A lot of their stuff seems to be either AMD or Intel based, Is there much difference in their respective offerings? I pass by anything by HP or lesser makers but the remainder do not look much different apart from details which may or not be important. A few at under £100 are perhaps not worth the effort. Lenovo are not very frequent nor Dell for some reason. I shall look at the detailed specs on the various versions and see how things compare if enough detail is stll available.