An older HP laptop with an 8 X 15" screen, I like the screen size. Well it is a laptop, so I put on a pot of coffee and sit in a bathrobe with the thing on my lap. Over the years, lint etc. has made the hard drive to overheat and do a slow death. I brought it to a computer guy who explained all this to me.
Last Christmas I got a ChromeBook, it's OK but I have to wear glassed to use it and I don't know how to copy-paste text or images. Appreciate any help you offer. The computer repair guy has two big guys he will sell, $300-400. Thinking about it.
It's probably not the hard drive in particular that overheated but blocking the vents and letting the cooling system ingest lint will lead to an overheat, usually the CPU first. Modern computers tend to go into emergency shutdown before the overheat permanently damages anything however.
^This
I was responsible for a bunch of laptops at one point. You might try using some canned air to blow out the vents in the sides / bottom / back depending on the system. If it can't cool off, it will create problems. It also isn't that hard to pull the bottom off and blow out the processor fan either.
I have an HP laptop that is now 5 years old. Was getting slow, so I spent $100 for a terabyte SSD drive. It now performs better than my bride's new Lenovo with a mechanical drive - of course, it was a decent system to begin with.
500GB SSDs are running about $50, so might be a cheap upgrade.
In reply to CJ :
I also recommend getting an SSD. Most mid range laptops will use some sort of 2.5" HDD so swapping it out for a 2.5" SSD will give it new life. My girlfriend's laptop continually kept getting "OS not found" errors every other boot up, and when it did boot into the OS it was painfully slow. I swapped the HDD with an SSD and probably added a few extra years to it's life, and on more "OS not found" errors.
Thermal paste that connect heat-generating parts to the heat sinks and coolant pipes also steadily dries up and needs to be reapplied every ~5 years or so too.
As long as the laptop is repairable, simple things could be done to return it to 100%.
