Need Laptop Help

I've got three laptops as follows:

Laptop #1: Old IBM from 2000.
Laptop #2: Dell laptop (not sure of age).
Laptop #3: Acer laptop (approx. 2 years old)

Laptop #1&3: Got bluescreen of death, restarted and now get error message saying "No operating system found".
Laptop #2: Was working fine and all of sudden slowed down to a snails pace. Have run Norton 360, Spybot, CrapCleaner, Microsoft Security Essentials and AdAware. Sometimes they find something and it's a little better for about five minutes and other times it says no problems found.

Anyone have any ideas and suggestions. The only thing that these were getting used for is TacomaWorld (me) and Facebook (my wife). Because I use TacomaWorld at work and my office computer is fine I'm thinking it's something to do with Facebook. But nobody else (our friends, relatives, etc) seems to be having these problems. I don't have recovery disks for any of the computers so that's not really an option.

Any ideas / recommendations?????

Thanks.

 

like phantom said 1 and 3 either bad hard drive or os is corrupt. Start by testing the hard drive. You can download tools such as ultimate boot cd to test hard drives and memory as well as a ton of other diagnostic utilities for hardware.
For laptop 2 it could be a virus. How much hard disk activity do you see when it slows down? Is the light blinking or on constantly? Check your process manager. Press CTRL ALT DEL and select task manager. Look to see at the bottom how much CPU usage is at. If it's at 100% or close to it something is hogging your CPU. Usually you can find that process and google it and find out what it is (ie virus, spyware, etc...)

 

I agree with Malwarebytes. Also, turn off System Restore before you do any scans on # 2, otherwise the viruses, spyware, etc. will most likely just be hiding and pop back into action later. Be sure to turn System Restore back on when you are done.

On the other two, see if you can find/borrow a Windows cd and reload the OS. Most computers today also have a built in restore option by pressing either F10 or some other key during boot. You should look up the correct F key for your systems.
If these methods don't work, it's most likely the hard drive.

 

Like AeroCooper said, google the laptop model and restore and see what comes up. My Sony laptop (fairly old now, runs XP and bought during the phase in of Vista) was running like a total dog. I turned the house upside down looking for the restore discs that never came with it then did some searching and low and behold, it's in a hidden HDD partition. Something like F10 during boot up gets you in there. Ran it and it's back to like new. You'll need to do delete a bunch of included bloat-ware and do a bunch of updates for IE, flash, java, media player etc and once it's up there should be a utility to make restore discs if you have a burner.

Look for the included restore partition first, I had never heard of that before mine died so I had a friend reload another copy of windows but it was a PITA and a bunch of stuff didn't work because we couldn't find the right drivers. Luckily we didn't wipe that part of the HDD during the OS install.

If your HDD is dead you can probably order restore discs from the manufacturer. I think Sony wanted $20 or $25.

 

Load on either Malware bytes or Super antispyware. Restart computer while pressing f8 Computer will restart in safe mode. THis does not allow all features to load. Than scan, I am sure you will find the issue. AFter or if it finds something clean it off than run the other scanner. Than restart the computer and see how it looks than. TOdd

 

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/chsafe.htm

 

Google for a free util called combofix

I thinks its available on bleepingcomupter.com