Laptop is about to die

[booth83]

So, my laptop is about to die permanently anytime soon I reckon, for months now intermittently it refuses to load up after switching it on, it powers up, the screen comes on, but it doesn't do the boot-up sequence, switching off, removing the battery and the power cable usually sorts this out (sometimes after a few attempts) although that always leads to having to do a startup repair where it loads to an earlier point when it was working fine.

Then twice this week it just simply didn't switch on at all, first time I just pulled the battery and it worked, second time was today and it wouldn't come on for about 6 hours.

When it is working it's usually very sluggish, takes a while to do something as simple as open firefox, and web pages can tak an age to load even though i have a good connection (26ms ping, 21.89 download, 5.93, upload tested a few minutes ago)

Basically, I want to start again with it, back up all the files i want to keep and load it to it's factory settings like it was out of the box. My opinion is the whole thing is just bogged down with viruses. I'm hoping it's not hardware issues.

How would I do that? and would it fix the problems i'm currently having? It's 3 or 4yrs old now and I would just replace it but my car needs a lot of money spending on it this week so just can't afford to.

[Baseley09]

Well Malwarebytes and spybot are two free anti virus/spyware program's that may get rid of some unwanteds, may be worth running first.

Doing a fresh install of Windows is always a joy tho so it would just be a case of putting what you want to keep on an external drive, boot off a borrowed windows disk and that will zap everything on the drive and make it appear relatively new.

[charlesr]

If after trying Baseley's excellent suggestions you do decide to do a fresh install, note that many laptops come with a windows install partition, especially if it didn't come with a physical windows disc. On bootup are there any options on screen like "press F5 to see recovery options" or something like that? If so, following those instructions will reset the machine to factory settings. You'll have to install a ton of windows updates afterwards, but it'll be easy.

[booth83]

I've tried a couple of antivirus/spyware programs recently with not much difference of note, I didn't get a windows disc so i'll have a look see if it can be done from bootup, getting an external hdd to backup won't be a problem so I think that's the route i'll take, cheers for the suggestions guys.

[EvilBoris]

What make of laptop is it?

[booth83]

It's a Compaq.

[JSR]

On Compaq you can usually hit ESC during boot-up which will take you to a menu where one of the F-buttons enters recovery mode. Usually F9 or F11 if I recall correctly. Are you sure it isn't overheating? Check that the fans are free of dust, and that the machine has enough room to "breath".

[EvilBoris]

Maybe f10 also.

You could get 2 options
Non-Destructive recovery and Destructive recovery.

One keeps your data, one doesn't