Windows Update unresponsive after win 10 upgrade

And last ...
You have 7z on your PC. You can use that as well

All the advice I got was re-install windows, which is what I was trying to do. And use 7z (in lieu of 'mount') is what I ultimately did . . .
- media tool to create the win 10 home 22h2 iso file. Mount not available (advice + link how-to from ghot in the forum here arrived after it was all over), so
- 7z to extract the iso file to an internal hard drive
- run setup from there.
It took nearly 6 hours to run (the OS set-up and install, plus the updates since the release in late '22) on a dual core, 2.3Ghz cpu with 6gb RAM laptop. I started it running just after 8pm last nite, and by 11pm it was saying 97%. I left the process to run and retired - the rest of it was all automatic after the normal operating hours had elapsed. I checked at dawn this morning (0615 local, gmt+10) and the updates page said up-to-date at 1.45 am after all the patches had been applied. Herself the user of that machine is happy and already past the point of being impressed by the start and shut-down speed of win10 compared to win7. Brownie points for the upgrade did not even last 8 hours.

For me, the main learning from this was the ability to upgrade/re-install windows using an in-place method: I'd only previously thought of this approach as one for a version upgrade. I used the forum tutorial on that topic 3 times now and it's worked fine: some of the actual steps are just a bit different from those in the document, but close enough to follow what was happening and what to do next, which in reality is all about setting the install parameters. Once started, it's auto until finished or an error occurs. Over 3 PC's that hasn't happened once.
A secondary learning is continued reliability of the computing hardware over the last 15 years. Both laptops have not had any hardware issues over that time, altho they are very much in the occasional usage category, and usually just for specific apps. I keep them up-to-date and backed up 'just-in-case'. Electronically, there's a case to be made for that sort of usage is harder on the laptop circuits than daily use of desktop. The desktop however is daily grunt machine, and it's had a major system build upgrade twice in the same time-frame, each time involving a motherboard failure, replacement of which had consequential effects on the hard drives, memory, displays etc. Even then, the m/b lasted 8 years before the latest replacement.

By extension of the reliability discussion, Microsoft's insistence on the TPM chip facility for security as part of win 11 - laudable that it is - and later generation processors is going to make support for win 10 beyond the announced end-of-support date of Oct 25 interesting. The sales penetration of win 11 is already flat-lining world-wide at a bit less than 30% if stats-counter can be believed, and I really doubt than users are going to replace perfectly functioning hardware using win 10 just to get win 11: the cost of new PC hardware has doubled over the decade to the point where it is no-longer "throw away". The sales graphs seem to be supporting that thesis. The same numbers also suggest that win 10 is marginally improving it's share - possibly die-hard win 7 users migrating to win 10 while they still can, just like I have done here.

So you made it after several hours.
Keep in mind that you have 2 Recovery-Partition now and a WIN10 and a WIN7 WinRE.wim. But that's easy to fix and takes just 5 minutes.

I have a planned backup cycle for the upgraded PC in 5 days (1st of the month routine). So how do I remove the left-over prior OS files? I'd rather not include them in the backup file.

fwiw I don't have a mount option in my *.iso files right-click menu either.