My dad recently bought a laptop off of craigslist. It had been running the beta of Windows 7 and had a lot of junk on it. He managed to restore the laptop's original OS (Vista), but it was running slow and didn't really work right. He tried to restore the computer using the recovery partition, but it apparently failed. He also tried using my laptop to burn a recovery disk to see if it would work too (since they're similar models), but that didn't work either.

I'm pretty sure it's a dv9610 from HP. He just sent it off to a shop to get it looked at, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask here in case anyone might have an idea. It started a few times, but after a while, it would always get these gray bars all across the screen. Personally, I think it's the motherboard or the fan (or both) because my old laptop did something similar. Any ideas would be great.

Sounds like an overheating problem if it's getting bars across the screen.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

The only problem is, he won't believe me.