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

Nice thing is is that it contains all neccessary drivers.Malwarebytes is pretty straight-forward, you just delete everything it suggests! I've never come across a false positive with mbam.