Wow - thank you for those suggestions. Very grateful of your time & trouble. I recognize some of them and indeed have already carried them out.
Other's though are entirely new ideas that I will have to study more closely. Before I do so may I just make one or two points as they occur to me.
- I have made the space available as requested by MS but the installation has still failed many times.
- On this HP Stream13 there is no possibility of expanding the SSD disk C:\ as it is soldered to the mother-board with no provision for extension. That said I see your suggestion to replace disk C:\ externally even though I don't fully understand it yet.
- My 3rd point is to say again how unsatisfactory it is to need to do so much work & study, in order to restore a device to where it actually is now! I should also mention the lost machine access time whilst all these failed tries to update are taking place.
- I am fortunate to have another machine (not mine) to use in order to make these enquiries to your good self and keep up to date with my emails etc. As a point of interest its is an older (C2011) Dell Inspiron running a UBUNTU OpSys. As sold it was WIN7 OS - but is chugging along well on UB. It's spec is much better than the HP Stream13 - but from my point of view it does the same job - perhaps due to slight differences that put me on a learning curve, not so easily as a WIN10 system. However I have to admit it does give one pause for thought. Is persisting with Windows products really worth the candle?
- I would like to thank you again for your knowledge, time & trouble.
Sincerely, BerryG