I have Windows Vista on my laptop, and whenever I open the launcher and click play, it says it is updating, and the bar will quickly fill and restart as it would after the update, except it doesn't update, and it won't let me play it. I have tried deleting it and re installing it, which did nothing. I have been searching around and it seems as if no one else is having this problem, unless I'm searching for the wrong things.
Any help you could provide would be extremely helpful, thank you!
Reinstall minecraft, if it still doesn't work look at the minimum required settings to play, if it doesn't reach it then of course, you can't play. If it does then i'm not sure. I just think your launcher broke while you were adding something or removing something from the minecraft files.
Does the bar completely fill, but doesn't light up the play button with the bar still full? If that's what's happening it's getting stuck on 99% and you just need to leave it for a while ^_^
If that's not what's happening and it's filling like it should and then going back to normal after it "updates" like it should, then the only thing I can see is try deleting it completely.
If you just delete the minecraft app it won't delete your.minecraft folder, which is more important than the actually game download. Look up online how to find and delete a.minecraft folder, I can't help you with how to do that since I'm on a mac (sorry!). If deleting the.minecraft folder doesn't help with anything then I'm sorry, and the only thing I can say to do is check the Mojang support page.