Windows Update Hangs

First recommendation. Stop doing daily updates.  Updates come once a month. The only ones that come in between 2nd Tuesdays are ones that are designed to move your computer to Windows 10.

-You also forgot "out of band" security updates. They are rare, but you'll want to install them asap in case there's another 0-day floating around...considering all the ransomware infecting windows boxes recently via flash ads or macro word documents.

Fans running at high speed have nothing to do in particular with Windows Update.  Fans run at higher speeds...are a sign that the computer is running warmer than it should and the fan is speeding up to rid itself of that heat.  That heat can be caused by all kinds of computer activity.

-Many bios' settings have automatic fan control on the cpu fan. If a core on the cpu gets pegged by activity, it ramps up. If you're annoyed by it, you might be able to disable it and have the fan run at full speed all the time or select a different mode like "silent," but keep an eye on the temps especially if you're using a stock cooler. Premium boards also give you the ability to setup fan curves so if the cpu is going north of 80 degrees, you can set the fan go into "turbo" mode at that point. I've got an aftermarket AIO cooler with an "quiet edition" sp120 from corsair that runs at ~45CFM. The fan control on my Asus board is called "Q-Control" and you can enable it (or set different modes) for any 4-pin PWM fan in the box.

From now on, expect to wait a long time for updates.  Sometimes many hours.  That is now normal.

^My replies are in bold above.

I also have a 6 year old Asus EEE PC single core cpu needing this and last month's updates and it took 4 hours and change. The cpu was pegged at 100% the enter time. Netbooks are pretty useless as you'll need to turn down the graphics settings just to watch a 720p video smoothly and I don't know many people who still have them when the fad was popular back in '09 and '10.

The cpu seems to be a factor here, at least for me. My desktop has a g3258 running at 4.6GHz that took ~30 minutes of searching for updates. That's a heavy overclock and probably the best performance on a dual-core cpu at the moment.

I am having the same problem with hanging while downloading and installing updates. On 4/12/16 Windows Update

was stuck at 0% for hours while downloading updates. I gave up and shut down the PC for the rest of the evening.

Today, 4/13/16, I tried Windows Update again and it was stuck at 0% while downloading for over an hour but it finally downloaded and installed all the updates successfully.

Microsoft probably has server or bandwidth issues because in the past this has never happened to me. I have one more PC, one laptop, and one virtual machine to update. It's going to take all damn day.

Many of us also had this identical problem last month on "Second Tuesday"; it cleared up the following day. However, I am still having this problem today, as are many others. Once it was cleared up last month, I had no problems and that was with auto checking updates (inform only, no downloading unless I say so) every day.

Maybe you feek should it should not make a difference.  Fact is, that it does make a big difference.

I would be very interested in your Linux conversion.  I have tried it myself and concluded that the average user could not manage it.  I'd like to know if your wife can?

This problem should only be experienced once per month. Then it can be done on an over-night basis. 

Check to see if KB3102810 is installed.  If not, download it directly and install it. 

Wife has played with Linux before but has an AIO HP printer that I haven't checked to see if it will work under Linux yet.

I've been playing with Quelitu Linux, http://wavesofthefuture.net/computers/linux-operating-system-refurbish-computer-free.shtml and it is as easy as pie to get that distro set up. It's an off shoot of Lubuntu without all the garbage.

As long as you run the set up that gets placed on your desktop after installing and go through the list of installing third party items, such as flash and codecs, etc.,  it's the easiest Linux distro I've ever used. Been using Linux some where for the last 10 years.

Yes, KB3102810 is installed.