Windows update. Possibly up to two years since last update.

Coming up on two years ago my boyfriend was killed by his friend who drinking and driving. My family and he have stayed close. Recently they gifted me with his old laptop so I can use it for school. Everything was pulled off and backed up at the time of his passing. So I was in the process of creating my own user and getting ready to use it for school. However, in the process it pretty much crashed. While re-starting it I realized it had not had any windows updates for almost close to 2 years. It's a windows 10 and working on a samsung laptop. Not sure the exact specs but it's a decent laptop. I am hoping having been so long it won't crash completey. After re-starting it jumped to Windows updating 13/19. Been there for about two hours now. While we have everything backed up I really don't want to loose what is on this computer for obvious reasons. Anyone have parting words of wisdom or ideas? Going to let it keep running over night.

Sorry to hear of your situation...

The first thing has to be for you to be 100% certain that you have copied all the stuff you want over to a flash drive or similar. Try the drive in another PC and be sure all you want is there.

I'm a bit puzzled by this 13/19 thing. We don't normally see anything like that on W10.

If you type into the search box winver and then press enter, what do you see ?

Sorry this is what I meant. Not sure I can get to the computer it's self with out shutting this down. It's been at this point for 8 hours now.

Thanks for the picture... so, that looks more like Windows 8 or 8.1 to me. Nothing should be taking that time to install.

You may need to do a forced shutdown to break out of that, which means holding your finger on the power button for several seconds until it responds and shuts off. Then see if it boots normally.

My advice (and its easy to say this at a distance) would be to then make 100% sure you have got all you need from the PC and then either:

1/ Look up the user manual on-line and follow the manufacturers factory reset procedure. That brings everything back to 'out of the box condition'.

2/ Consider doing a clean install. That wipes the drive and you start with the cleanest possible installation and with none of the junk that comes preinstalled on most PC's.

3/ See if the W8.1 to W10 free offer is still accepted (does anyone on here reading this know what the current official line is on this ?). Then its just a case of entering the old licence key which is usually printed under the laptop.

If it is W8/8.1 and/or you want or have to stick with that then there are some excellent tutorials on EightForums on how to clean install but W10 would be the way to go if the licence can still be converted:

https://www.eightforums.com/

I vaguely recalled seeing something along those lines. It would certainly be worth a try with everything to gain and nothing lose really.

I recently (April 26) used a valid unused W7 key to set Windows 10 Insider Preview.