Well, sometimes things can solve themselves.... 😄
Last night my laptop did a major Windows update, and lo and behold today I have been working with sketchup and it's running just fine.
Even rendering works without glitches and bugsplash.
Sorry to bother in this matter.

Laptop is a Lenovo G50,
came with a 1 TB HDD,
16 GB ram,
I7 dual core 3.5Ghz processor