I updated Windows at their suggestion and it took a whole day and half the night and even when it deigned to let me in it went on a go-slow for a while. What do I gain from these updates? Are they really necessary?
Yes, some of them are necessary such as security fixes and fault resolution, some are nice like functional enhancements - some of them won't benefit you at all but figuring out which is which would take more time than most of us can be bothered to spend on it so it's best to suck it up and apply them all.