Process of elimination means it could be the cpu is starting to fail?

[LBCvalenz562]

A friend needed help with his laptop it was running extremely slow to the point it was unusable and has been sitting in a closet.

I tried to get in and see what was going on but i noticed as soon as i turned it on that it was slow getting into windows and when it did i realized that i had to wait 2-5 minutes for it to process anything just opening the start menu took about 2 minutes, then after it would open what i wanted it just froze and had to be restarted. It ran a little better when i went into safe mode but once i tried to open any files the same issue would happen.

He didn't have any files worth saving so i just did a fresh install of windows 7. Same issues. So i decided to run some tests on the hard drive by connecting it to my pc and it worked perfectly fine even ran tests on it and they came out fine. I even went as far as switching the ram from a working laptop just to make sure it wasn't it. So is it safe to say the cpu is toast?

 

[turkey3_scratch]

What does task manager show for CPU usage? That would've been the first thing I did. Also, when putting the hard drive in your computer, Windows probably resorted to new or basic drivers so perhaps a driver is causing the problems.