BSOD yay funnn

[frommetononame]

My father sold our neighbor one of our older laptops about 2 months ago and now he complains that the internet is not working. My father hands it to me and says fix it...

Anyways I turn it on to find that internet is the least of their problems. I am first greeted with a window stating that there are important updates by pc optimizer pro. and less than 30 seconds later BSOD hits.

I would like to get them up and running if there is a way I might be able to, but I am not entirely sure how to tackle it.

The laptop in question is a Vista Sp1 that wont update to Sp2. So it has pre existing dilemmas.
Thanks so much for the help if you can provide it.

[ninjatex]

Sounds like somebody installed some crapware. If you can boot into safe mode, download, install, and scan with malwarebytes anti-malware and your anti-virus of choice. If removing everything they find doesn't work, I'd suggest re-installing Windows as it will take less time than actually finding the source of the problem.

[frommetononame]

Funny thing is I told them that I suspected crapware (in the least offensive way possible) and the guy tried to tell me its just for his kids homework so it couldn't possibly be that...

Anyways I let him know that the options I knew about were, wait until I hear something back online, or a clean install. So he wants to try a clean install. -.- Anyways thanks for the reply.

Also, a bit off topic but, is there anywhere I can learn how to use malwarebytes. I would like to be a little bit more self sufficient when dealing with this sort of problem.

[Allan]

Download BlueScreenView:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html
unzip downloaded file and double click on BlueScreenView.exe to run the program.
when scanning is done, go to EDIT - Select All
Go to FILE - SAVE Selected Items, and save the report as BSOD.txt
Open BSOD.txt in Notepad, copy all of the content, and paste it into your next reply

[patio]

I would wipe the drive and use the original Laptop Recovery CD to re-install.

Nice thing is is that it contains all neccessary drivers.

[ninjatex]

Malwarebytes is pretty straight-forward, you just delete everything it suggests! I've never come across a false positive with mbam.