Had a thinkpad once that had a cracked motherboard that caused endless problems and shutdowns until I replaced it. My newest Win 7 T500 Thinkpad wax getting long in the tooth, having been dropped a number of times, had cracks, missing pieces, stuck keys and a failing fan, so I went on eBay and found a like new T500 replacement Seriously, looked like it was brand new) and switched my hd over, registered windows and bob's your uncle. Turns out companies would buy these high end (for the time) laptops by the gross and when the whole bunch were sold w/o any windows license. I keep it mainly for my wife to vpn into work as I have transitioned to just using an iPad Pro w/ external bt keyboard 99% of the time.
As to Windows update, always have religiously kept windows machines updated, but only manually. On the rare occasion something wouldn't install I was usually able to find someone on the net who had the same exact problem and noodle out a solution. For the Acer I would be tempted to pull the hd and pitch the laptop after extracting anything I wanted to save.
