Hi guys, needing some help with my wife's laptop, if anyone is tech savvy enough to help.
It's a HP, fairly recent, with which we've had no problems up until Sunday, when it suddenly started having some serious issues, and we haven't been able to get to the bottom of it.
Basically, it started crashing a lot, wouldn't let us connect to the internet, wouldn't let us run any programmes, and was running horribly slowly.
With some persistence on our part, we've managed to run the antivirus programmes, and Spybot, which were largely unfruitful, except for one little error pointing to Firefox. We managed to uninstall it eventually (curiously, the computer let us connect to the internet, but only through Internet Explorer) and re-download it.
Things seemed to be fine, it was running quicker and quite smoothly, when suddenly it started crashing again out of the blue, and is now worse than ever.
It does seem to work better in the first few minutes when we turn it on, which made me think it could be an overheating problem leading to the computer slowing down to reduce heat output, but have no idea if this is true.
We don't know how to diagnostic the problem, is it mechanic or a virus?
Any advice about how to get this sorted would be massively appreciated. It is, of course, no longer under guarantee, and taking it somewhere to be fixed would probably cost us the price of a new computer. We also obviously don't want to lose the 18 months of photos stocked on it!
Thanks in advance!