Long story short I lost my n900 about 3 months ago which had all the current updates on via the exclamation mark on the top bar.

Having decided i wanted a new one because i dislike the way most other phones are designed I purchased a second hand one.

The phone i currently have is on 2.2009.51-1.203.2 yes the phone will not display that there is an update available anywhere.

I have checked for the exclamation mark for normal updates
and also refreshed the updates page under the appmanager.

any solutions on how to get this up to date

have google this and keep being led back to needing to reflash something but not too sure if thats reali what i need.

If it's a second-hand phone, I'd highly recommend flashing it to take it back to a 'known' configuration. Who knows what tweaks/hacks/mods the previous owner might have applied....

See here: http://wiki.maemo.org/Updating_the_firmware

thanks for the fast reply jedi, have looked through the page u linked and it has no confused the crap of of me :S

not realy messed around with flashing software before and kinda confused as to which i'm supposed to download is there not just one file that can be run to reset it to the lowest version of maemo? (ie a factory reset) because all i've found on that is flashing it to pr1.3 which is the most recent version i believe? so wouldnt i have a load of stuff missing?

also as i'm typing this decided to give the ovi suite a try keeps giving me device recovery after it tries to update saying its lost connection with my n900? any ideas on that

I would, like jedi, recommendo you to flash it using the nokia flasher (beware if using x64 OS). I'd reflash both the emmc and the root partition, so you have a "new" n900.

I would also not rely on the official app manager application and install fapman as soon as possible, and perform regular updates without statusbar icon need.

Rite well think i've worked out whats needed so got all the files together and jst waiting on the phone to hit the little green light on charging :P anymore issues and i'll be back :P

Good luck!