major help plz!!

ok so its finals week and my friend has finals coming up but all his notes are on his laptop. He came to me last night and said that it was running extremely slowly. he also noted that he has been getting a lot of BSOD's. so i go to work. first thing i do is uninstall macafee (a lot of my friends in the dorms are having issues with it) and it starts to run fine. i install MS antispyware and scan. it finds nothing. i install SAV. first installation freezes. i reboot and try again. this time i get a BSOD. restart do it all agin and it seemed to go fine. restart and it back to the same slow as a snail. there was a period that when i would boot up, it would ask for safe mode or normal mode. no matter what i chose, it would flash a BSOD for a milisecond, then reboot and it would keep doing this. i got my XP cd and went to recovery console and ran a checkdisk and that fixed the crash cycle. so now whenever it actually makes it into windows, it will eventually crash to a BSOD (0x24). i tried to go to the recovery console, but it asks me for the admin password and he doesnt know it :/ so how can i unistall SAV if i cant get into windows without it crashing?!?! plz we need some help!! im beginning to think that some piece of hardware is failing, but i cant pinpoint it HELP!!!

Not to seem really dumb, but what do you mean SAV?

Symantec Anti-virus?

Symantec Anti-Virus, now Norton Anti-Virus...can you even get into safe mode?

What I'd say...you have a lot more control from Safe Mode. I have to honestly say Norton products, though good, are terrible resource hogs. As you are describing, start thinking about a hardware problem. Although I am not really familiar with laptops, there are a good amount of people here who should be able to help you out.