No, but you can check to see if Steam set itself to not auto-update the game on your laptop.  Just select it in your Library, right-click and select Properties. The game should also force update when you try to play it (unless it's been set not to auto-update).

What version does the game say on the main menu?  

Then its up to date.

delete your rebellion.settings file and try again.

It should be located somewhere similar to this:

C:\Users\[user]\Desktop\Documents\My Games\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion\Setting

Yeah, it's not updated - 1.031 is the latest.  

Karl - You should probably contact Steam support at this point. I'm not sure why it won't let you update the game. I suspect if you deleted local content and reinstalled that would fix it.