How to make windows lighterweight for low end hardware?

[NightHawkRMX]

Hello, so i recently a acquired a low-spec laptop. It was in rough shape internally causing it not to power on, however the exterior looked in good shape. I opened it up to find the WiFi/Bluetooth card was snapped out of the motherboard and the connector on the board was broken. Also, the CPU heat-sync was only held on by 1 screw, not even touching the CPU die. After securing the Heat-sync with a loose screw found internally (only 2 of the 4 screws are present but i used a liberal amount of Artic thermal paste), the laptop powered on, showing me that the touch pad and WiFi didn't work. I connected a USB mouse and WIFI adapter, occupying both of the laptops USB ports, making the laptop functional with thermals running in the high 50s when at idle (idle is 50-100% usage) and high 70s when running Banished, my favorite game in my steam library that runs on this.
Here are the specs:
Intel Celeron N3050 2c/2t that seems to turbo around 2.5ghz. It is based on the 14nm Braswell Architecture so it sips power around 5 watts.
Intel HD graphics
2GB LpDDR3 ram @1600mhz
32gb eMMC solid state storage
1366x768 TN screen
Windows 10 home
There is NO upgradable components on the motherboard
The main problem i have is the speed of this laptop. I understand this laptop is not powerful, however i am looking for a way to bandage this. I have already gotten Comodo IceDragon, a lightweight browser based on Firefox that runs faster than most other browsers, removed some unneeded programs, set windows power settings for best performance, and set windows graphical options for best performance. When i look in task manager i see the problem is the CPU struggling with its slow 2 threads. The main user of the CPU when browsing the web are Windows's processes. The web browser only uses 20%ish of my cpu and windows kills the rest of my cpu, making the system a bit slow. How can i stop this from happening, i am open to running linux, however i would like to dual boot linux and windows 10, however the small storage amount may present an issue.
Another issue relating to the storage is windows update. This laptop's copy of windows hasn't been updated since it was new, shipping with Windows 10 1607 from 2017. I keep getting messages about my unsupported version of windows, saying it needs 8gb to update. Since this laptop has only 28gb of storage after formating, this update is impossible. Is there a way to update this without using that much storage? I may have to invest in a 128gb SD card.
I look forward to a response!

 

[USAFRet]

I have a similar level laptop, an Asus Transformer T100T.
2GB RAM, Celeron Z3470. 32GB eMMC drive...

There isn't really a whole lot you can do to make it 'better', or lighten up Windows.
It is and always will be - slow, with any recent Windows OS.

For your OS Update, create a new Win 10 USB install from some other machine, via the MediaCreation tool.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
Boot from that, and it will let you Update it, even with that little free space.

The reason it fails currently is because it is trying to download the whole Update and then run that.
The downlaod sucks up too much drive space, leaving not enough free to actually update it.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Ok thanks for your imput. I will try that, although that will take awhile. I think i may still grab an sd card to do some dual booting