Hi Henry,
Have a look at this post (eg, trying updating your graphics drivers, since you’re on Windows).
In addition to that post, another issue that could cause this is your system not having support for OpenGL version 2 or above. For example, if you’re using a remote desktop (or maybe using a Virtual Machine where the graphics hardware is not being used for OpenGL). In this case it will fallback to OpenGL 1.1 and can produce the error message you have (note that this only happens on GPlates 2.3 but not 2.2, due to upgrading from Qt4 to Qt5). So maybe try updating graphics drivers and then use GPlates natively on your laptop (ie, not through a remote desktop or VM).