Windows 7: Installing update 11 of 17....

My machine has been stuck on installing this update all night. I think my hard drive may be full, what should I do? Been meaning to format that thing and reinstall windows to it since its just a 40 gig SSD. Any ideas?

For starters try uninstalling a few programs to create space and then try updating again.

However if you want to do a clean install of Windows 7 then just do that and add an external drive or an internal drive to the computer to take the overflow. 40 gigabytes should easily suffice if you are careful and do not clutter up the SSD with unused programs.

Can you make the second drive take the overflow automatically or do you have to do it manually?

You can nominate the second disk to contain or be the My Documents Folder. That means that all the big files that you download shall automatically be saved there.

You can also nominate it to contain the Programs File Folder so that all the third party programs that you install are there. But that should not be necessary and I do not recommend it.

You can read this at User Folders - Change Default Location.