Hi Richard
Took my system to get checked out. Had a power spike knocked out all power to my home.
Thought PC had gone since it would not boot.
Power supply got hit - Was replaced all good.
Techie who worked on my PC suggested that Win 7 was out of Date to which I agreed and related my story.
He suggested that I use the full capability of my MB (Gigabyte Z370- HD3) by installing a SSD directly onto the M2 socket on my MB, an Samsung 860 EVO M.2 500GB, V-NAND, (2280), SATA III 6GB/s, R/W(Max). (cost me $140 AUD and $140 to install The Best $280 I ever spent). and to run the lastest WIN 10.
Since I have WIN 7 and a Copy of WIN 10 backed onto separate bootable hard drives, I save all my data onto a separate SSD removable disk, therefore I was able to risk it.
After I collected my PC and turned it on I cannot believe the speed, it literally boots up in 10 seconds (really) and all updates are done behind the scene and if they do become intrusive, a message pops up telling me that I can use my PC while the updates are installing.
I cannot believe the transformation to my PC , I am happy again but that does not excuse Microsoft for wanting to know how many hairs I have up my nose. I just block all the intrusive Bull***t out.
May I suggest that you give this a go if your MB supports the M2 or has an M2 Socket, or perhaps change to a MOBO that has the M2 Socket.
Cheers Hope the above works for you if you decide to go down this path...