It could even be the motherboard/ hard drive interface playing up because of driver clashes or hardware problems.

you got malware.

The Metropolitan Police Ukash Ransomware is a computer virus, which will display a bogus alert, that pretends to be from the UK police and states that your computer has been blocked due to it being involved with the distribution of pornographic material, SPAM and copyrighted content.

Download Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free to get it out. You might need another system and put the program onto an usb mem stick, then put this into infected system and scan.

Click Start, Run and type msconfig

Look at the tab which says startup

Are there many items listed with check marks against them?

If there are lots, then everyone one of them is a program or service which loads when the pc boots into windows. If there are lots, then this can bring even a quite powerful Pc to its knees from a speed point of view.

Well he rang me this afternoon to say that everything seems to be OK, he uninstalled the webcam and a couple of programs, rebooted then reinstalled them and its all been fine since........ we shall see I guess..........

Thanks for everyone's suggestions

In reply to a post by scottybhoy:

you got malware.

The Metropolitan Police Ukash Ransomware is a computer virus, which will display a bogus alert, that pretends to be from the UK police and states that your computer has been blocked due to it being involved with the distribution of pornographic material, SPAM and copyrighted content.

Download Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free to get it out. You might need another system and put the program onto an usb mem stick, then put this into infected system and scan.

this is the correct advice for this virus and should be part of everyone's security

As the laptop was formatted and hard disk replaced I doubt he still has the malware