Windows 10: Help for the gray haired part of the population

This post will be longer and different than most, but I hope it shows as is, because it will be of benefit to a large market segment that normally gets overlooked.

I am a retired senior on a fixed income and rely on my computer to stay in touch with friends and get information on Social Security, Medicare and the like. I could not call myself tech savvy by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a basic knowledge of how this works.

I do not play games, stream movies or shows, or watch live news or live programs or anything of that nature. In other words, I have no need for stuff like the Xbox feature, and have no outside apps or superfluous crud of any kind on my computer. I regularly delete temp files and empty the trash bin.

I have an HP Stream laptop I bought two years ago. It runs Windows 10 Home, version 1703.

For the past few months I have been getting pop up messages several times a day, telling me "feature update for Windows 10, version 1903" is available, but cannot be downloaded because there is not enough space.

I have clicked the "Fix Issues" tab countless times, followed all the prompts, and even added external storage as suggested. But to no avail. I have perused various Windows forums I was directed to through Bing and Google, read numerous posts and answers, and spent hours applying suggested fixes to a variety of error messages -- but I keep getting the same results.

To list every step and fix I have tried would take several pages, and I am not going to do that. Suffice it to say that after all said and done, it eventually gets to a point where the screen message will read "Downloading updates" and a blue bar will go to 100%. Then "Preparing to install updates" and again a blue bar will go to 100%. Then it will sit there like that for several minutes, but finally the original message comes up again, stating that more space is needed yada yada yada. Very frustrating, to say the least. Surely there has to be a way to resolve this issue without having to go and pay some computer guru $200 -- which should not be necessary and I very definitely cannot afford, anyway.

Current storage reading is: C Drive: 23.9 GB used out of 29.1 GB; D Drive: 3.24 GB used out of 29.2 GB. So it really is not like there is nowhere to put stuff. Just how much space is needed for that update??? There has to be an answer -- other than dynamite......

Your comments and suggestions -- in plain english, please -- will be sincerely appreciated .

Thanks.

:)

 

help to remote connect

not sure how to use both programs u 2 suggested, i need more helpful steps thanks

 

"Gray Screen of Death"

Thanks for your informative post!

I had solved my 2D & gray screen issue using advice posted by erocker (see below)
Mainly it involves creating a profile and putting higher 2D clocks:

 

Gray Box

Hi Debbie,

We would like to know more information about your concern so we can better assist you.

• When did you start seeing the gray box on your computer?
• What troubleshooting steps have you done so far?

We look forward to your response.