I was going to upgrade my wife's PC to Windows 10, and migrate over to a larger hard drive (she's left 2GB space on the current one). She's expressed concern repeatedly that I'm going to bugger things up.

All I did was restart the computer, and it started configuring updates. Probably because of the lack of space, it froze. I restarted it and...won't start up. System Restore fails. Everything I've tried fails.

How do I explain that all I did was restart it?

Buying her a new computer is a good move

Quote
Forrest
Buying her a new computer is a good move

Considering it’s ten years old, that’s great advice.

If it had over a 3.5 on Windows Experience rating and will boot from a USB flash drive, drop in a SSD and start fresh.

It's usually a bad idea to try to upgrade the OS on a HD that's over 6 years old unless there is a record that the drive health is perfect.

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In tha 360. MRF User Map

It has a Windows Experience Index of 3.8. It did perk up considerably after putting in an SSD 3 or 4 years ago.

In the end, after a harrowing day, I had success.
1. Removed the 240GB SSD from my wife's PC
2. Cloned it to a 960GB SSD using Macrium Reflect
3. Moved the rescue partition to the end of the drive using Minitool Partition Wizard which then allowed the boot volume to be expanded to over 600GB.
4. Installed the 960GB SSD into the computer then, because it wouldn't boot at all at this point
5. Ran Windows startup recovery.

The PC now booted, completed the Windows Updates, and then upgraded without incident to Windows 10. So: 8 hours to restart the computer, 1 hour to install Windows 10.

For comparison: When High Sierra got jacked on my then-new 2017 MBP, I was able to start up from the internet and reinstall it. Now THAT's style!