I would right click on the taskbar on bottom of the screen, click on task manager, go to processes, check the box for show all processes and see how much memory and processor power is being used. I have seen computers lock up like you're describing with Windows update running in the background and using 99% of the processor power. If so there will be a process whose name starts with wau that is using at least 80% of the CPU.
You can also go to the control panel, open Windows Update and see when it last checked for and installed updates.
Aaron Z
I have not read all of the other symptoms and responses on later posts to this thread. I have a 2012 HP 3D 17" Envy notebook with one of the fastest CPUs available at the time, 8 GB RAM, dual hard drives, two external monitors connected, Windows 7, etc., etc. Over time mine has gotten slower and started what appeared to be locking up. Investigation showed that whenever RAM usage went over 50% or so (kept Task Manager running for reference), I would get poor performance resembling lockups. I discovered through Task Manager that my Internet browser sessions (IE at the time) were using RAM in many hundreds of megabytes at a time for each session and sometimes up to a GB of usage. I would stop all browser sessions but Task Manager still showed IE having active sessions I had to kill or would not die. A reboot always fixed the problem. I had a similar issue using Chrome. Then tried Firefox and it used less memory but the version I am running with latest updates may go into stall/clocking condition. If I kill the offending session, all Firefox windows die. Restarting Firefox brings up a message that Firefox had a problem... and then reloads all of the previous active windows.
With my slow RAM swapping to hard disk issue, I recently replaced both internal hard drives with a single 1TB Crucial 300MX SSD. Wow, even with the RAM swapping to SSD, the speed is far greater than ever before. Very pleased. I then upgraded the RAM to 16GB to alleviate the memory shortage. As expected, the additional RAM did not make much difference as the hard drive had been the bottleneck. I previously went to Windows 10 with similar issues, did not particularly like it and went back to Windows 7 when I discovered the spring of 2017 W10 updates would lock in a lot of intrusive, privacy killing updates. Recently I see Microsoft has decided not to do some of them, most likely due to poor consumer feedback is my guess.
My wife's inexpensive, HP notebook (2014) with touch screen, 6GB RAM, Windows 8 and now Windows 10, has always been slow and would become unresponsive. But, she did not invest much money and she got what she got. I just upgraded her hard drive to a Crucial 300MX 750 GB and the PC is now lightening fast.
So rule of thumb with consumer computers is generally, the mechanical hard disk is the performance bottleneck. And Internet browser plugins can cause them to become really bloated memory hogs.
during Windows 7 Service Pack 1 KB976932 update - Microsoft Community
