Laptop issues..

Alrighty, here goes. My brother, who's 14 (Zetro on here, fyi.) has an HP Laptop. (WHELP THERE'S YOUR PROBLEM BRO!) He'd gotten May-ish last year, and for the most part, it's worked fine. However, last Saturday? it completely went crazy.
He can't seem to do anything on it, like at all. If he'd open Steam, anything he clicks, his computer freezes, like, completely. Opening the control panel, searching for things via the Start menu, opening Firefox, etc. The cursor acts af if it's loading, and nothing happens. No Ctrl+Alt+Del will work, the start menu won't open, nothing. Only turning it off by holding the power button for a few seconds works, and just shut it off. Instead of going into long detail of WHAT we've tried, I'll make a list.

1,) Defragmenting the hard drive.
2,) Running CCleaner and clearing everything.
3,) Running a complete Virus Scan (With MSE.) Which took 11 hours to complete.
4,) Running chkdsk to check for Hard drive errors, which seems to crash the PC.
5,) System restoring, which failed, because the PC froze.
6,) Trying all of the above in safe mode, but it didn't work, it still froze.
7,) Reinstalling any drivers. (Sound, Display, Keyboard, Mouse, etc.)
8,) HP Maintenance (Which also froze.)
and lastly, we tried doing a system reformat, with the HP tool. When we tried that, ti just boots Windows normally, and then freezes.

At this point, me and my brothers are convinced it's hardware related, and most likely the hard drive or CPU. Unless you have any other fixes, we have one alternative.

Build a new PC.

He's (possibly) going to get a new PC if his laptop IS dead, and here's some guidelines.

-It needs to run TF2, l4d2, and MAYBE Vindictus at max. (Maybe not VIndictus, but l4d2 and TF2 for sure.)
-It needs to be $450 or less. (Not including a Monitor OR GPU.)
-It needs everything but a monitor, GPU, and keyboard / mouse.

So, what do you guys think?

Edit: It's an HP Laptop running WIndows 7 64-bit. It's got a Radeon 4250 HD Mobile Graphics chip, and a 2.3ghz dual core CPU.

http://arstechnica.com/information-t...-own-hardware/

I think that and this should probably become stickies here... Have at it man, try to isolate the problem to a system component. From what you describe likely susptects may be memory or the HDD.

Before I go very thoroughly through the guide, it seems like it's HDD and RAM problems. I have trouble searching for files, but I also have trouble just running Windows 7 on it. Will look into it, but it seems like it's RAM or CPU.

Will post an update later.