EC83 Wrote:
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> I'm no expert on these things, but it sounds like
> hard drive damage to me.
This.
Only other possible cause to spring to mind would be that the CPU heatsink has almost come away, so the CPU has just about crawled to a halt to avoid completely melting itself, but that's
extremely unlikely. They do tend to throttle down when overheating, but before getting this slow they shut themselves off completely.
Stop her using the laptop until you can get another hard drive. All it will do is lose more data. Get someone to take the old drive out, but keep hold of it, and reinstall whatever Windows came with the laptop (a lot easier if the laptop came with recovery CDs or DVDs... hopefully it's not a cheap laptop with the recovery data on a 2nd partition on the hard drive, or you're going to have to reinstall Windows the longer way, manually looking for drivers and such).
When you've got the system working again, plug the old hard drive into USB caddy such as
this (we'll check to see if it's SATA or PATA before we order) so we can rescue any documents and data she might need.
If you're by yourself on this one, post the laptop make a model (it'll be on the underside - post a photo if you're not sure which number) and we'll start guiding you through the rest.
The good news is that it looks as though the hard drive is the only victim, so unless it's an old laptop she was thinking of replacing in the near future, it'll be relatively cheap to fix. Might just take a little while to do it.