OT means off topic. ...don't know 'what you've been reading on other sites, lol. Btw. Asking your parents for the receipt sounds like a smart idea; Check if the machine is still under warranty. ...as some people already mentioned there are indications for hardware failure. Now let asume for a moment there is NO hardware failure... You should be able to do a fresh install via DVD or pendrive using the correct version of Windows. *...depends on the geographical location; where the machine was bought*. In my country these days most machines come pre-installed with Windows 8.x Core version.
Sounds like a laptop I was working on months ago..... It had the pre-8.1 Windows 8 and doing a factory recovery took forever! Like XP with only 64 MB of RAM! It was a Toshiba laptop with an AMD E350! Windows at times felt like I was running XP with only 64 MB of RAM! And sometimes felt like running Windows 95 on a 386 with only 4 MB of RAM! Sometimes, it acted like the HDD was in PIO mode. (Only 4 MB/s or close to that) (Feels like copying large files to a USB pen drive!) WTF! IIRC, it sometimes froze at the familiar Windows 8 animation, which reminds me of the European Union flag.