actually reinstalling windows might not be such a bad idea. You can do it by burning a Windows 7 image to an USB stick, and if you want to do it, I can write you simple instructions how to do it yourself, since it's relatively easy, but if you really wanna make sure it's not hardware, you gotta do a clean install (lose all the files).
If that shows to be a bad idea, maybe those two are right, not sure how old the laptop is, if it's worth fixing, depending on what has gone wrong in it.