We finally managed to get th th laptop to update.
Using an additional SD cars didn't work, no matter what we tried (even though it was reciognised as a drive with a drive letter). Had to buy a USB stick and download the media creation tool and make a bootable usb stick from that. Then rebooted using the recovery menu (hotkey to get into bios wasnt working).
From the advanced startup menu i selected to boot from usb. Was told i doedid have enough space even though the only thing on the hard drive was windows. Had to completely format the drive and delete recovery partitions and selcted clean install. That worked.
The laptop now has the latest version of windows and windows update says there are no more updates to download. Unfortunately, it blue-screens every 30 mins of use due to insufficient memory so it's now totally unusuable. Next, Im going to install windows XP on it, see how that goes. I dont think windows 10 is going to fit on this thing.