Help with old laptop, Windows 7

[Hemi-Cuda]

A friend of mine asked for help with an old laptop (like 2008 old), so I offered to try wiping it and installing Windows 7 fresh to see if I could squeeze anymore life out of it. Install went fine, upgrade to SP1 went fine, but after that Windows Update refuses to do anything. It sits on Checking for updates indefinitely, and nothing I've tried has helped. A chkdsk /r ran fine but didn't help, I ran the windows update automated troubleshooter, but it gives me an error 0x80070057 that it can't fix. Looking up that error doesn't tell me what the problem actually is, and the fix I've seen to modify a registry value under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdat e\UX doesn't work because that entry doesn't exist in regedit

So now I'm out of ideas, anyone ran into a similar issue with Windows Update doing nothing?

[Vulcan]

Have you tried to update in Safe Mode?

[TheDragon]

Encountered a similar problem with my old laptop that I rebuilt last week. I actually ended up having to format it again, (blew away the partitions,) and then I ended up downloading Samsung's SoftwareUpdate utility. It was able to push the first couple of critical updates through with it, and from there it installed the rest.

Have you tried installing the newest version of Windows Update? You can find the standalone patch via Google+db.microsoft.com

[DoubleF]

Could it be a registry error? An update not installed, but the OS thinks it's installed? (ie: Interrupted in the middle)

Try a program like CCleaner maybe and clean up the registry and see if it helps? That and restarting the computer a few times. I seemed to remember that sometimes an update would go through after a few restarts after failing a crap ton of times.

[EldrickOnIce]

The best thing I could recommend with breathing life into an old notebook is installing some flavour of Linux.
I installed Ubuntu on an old Windows 7 notebook that was virtually unusable, and it is now a really very nice surfing/light duty notebook and an excellent media centre computer.
I know it sounds a bit radical, and I expect you won't try it, but it is easy to install and it's light enough to be very functional on an older machine but still rich enough so that it offers a very nice, easy user experience.

[Hemi-Cuda]

I know Linux fairly well myself, but there's no way I'm dealing with the headache of having to support it for someone who's never used it before

And I did get it to start updating, there was a specific KB I saw mentioned that might have been plugging things up, so once I installed that manually and left it to check for updates for another hour it finally went through. Then I only had another 9 hours to go for it to install all of the 283 updates. I forgot how painful a fresh Win 7 install was