ampfixer
I've looked at 2 Win 7 machines in the last week and both were unable to successfully perform updates for the system or Windows Defender. I saw on the MS site that defender no longer provides full protection under Win 7, but nothing about system updates.
I'm thinking they're actively trying to push people off the platform.
Depending on exactly where the machine is (updates wise), it can take a **long** time for the machine to connect to the MS update servers and download/install the Win7 updates.
There are several updates you can manually download/install... and ultimately circumvent the issue.
IMO, MS is doing this to "encourage" folks to move to Win10.
Not excusing MS in any way... but (at this point) Win10 is solid/robust as a DAW platform.
There's more to shut down, but with the Pro version the Group Policy Editor makes it easy to shut down Cortana, etc.