Surprise surprise, she finally came to pick up the laptop last night. Just paid for the part.
There's some site that bundles all updates up to latest, for free. Can't remember the url but it's supposed to install everything in one go.
I got the one for xp many moons ago but never bothered with it. I'm pretty sure they do/did win7 too.
Forgot about that. I used to use that with XP when I did reinstalls. Not sure what it was called. Didn't think about using that for 7. Maybe I'll see if it's available.