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So I have a 3rd hand laptop . The previous two owners only had it for a short time but each took their toll on it so when I got it the fan was failing and it had an overheating issue.

I cleaned the malware etc off and got it running nicely but it keeps slowly deteriorating leaving me to try more drastic measures, so. I'm considering wiping it off to basic functions or a factory reset.

What do people who know stuff about computers think? (It runs so damn slowly now and overheats all the time, malware and virus sweeps are negative and defray don't help)

Relatives work laptop. Hp Elitebook. My inlaw got it for works then after a few weeks of trying to use it for work and play and who knows what else decided he didn't like it so passed it to his wife who did the same for a few months. Then it came to me lol

Pretty sure there is more than one corrupted file and I have absolutely no idea what was done to it before I got it to put it in this state. Takes 10mins to load up and be useable right now as windows loads pretty fast but then slows to a halt as it gets to my desktop and loads programs one by one in the most painful manner ever. Checked it again today, internal fan is totally dead, gonna need to replace that before anything else...

Once it is up and running (I just turn it in and leave it for 15mins) it kinda works normally but if I make it do ANYTHING hard, life play a flash or browser game, it overheats in minutes. And by overheats I mean I have it suspended 1 inch above a separate fan base by its sides which is also clear of obstruction so it has all the help it can get but still gets seriously hot to the touch and turns itself off.

A clean install couldn't hurt, especially if there are a lot of unwanted startup programs. Gradually worsening overheating could be a hardware problem, though, like a bad airflow or battery.

Yup, read your post and tested somthing... Battery is also dead. The second I unplug it from the wall it's lights out...

How do people do this to laptops so fast....

Labtops are so fragile that I wouldn't settle for one unless it had the heavy duty-bulky desgin to it.

But yeah if the fans busted then it's not going to run for more than a hour in best case scenario. It would take a around 3-4 drops on wood flooring or something to bust the battery and fan, that could also have damaged the harddrive.

I don't know to much about interior design of Labtops, but if it has a mini CPU fan then that could be broken aswell. 

When people forget to install AdBlock and go to fishy sites without proxies, or really believe that hot Czech girls are ready to mingle.

Or they try to jury-rig any slight software issues with the wrong drivers.

If it's over heating, you might need to open it up.

It might needed some canned air to clear the fan and heat sink.

It might also need some thermal paste replaced as some places don't put it on properly. 

It could help with some of the slowness too as if it is over heating badly things tend to not want to work the best.

My laptop had to have the heatsink cleared of dust and have the thermal paste replaced recently as it was over heating to the point the thing would crash.

Were the previous owners smokers and/or pet owners? Because that could hint to what you might find inside. You might want gloves in the case of a smoker. I've read enough talesfromtechsupport on reddit to learn that tip.

An old laptop that goes through a lot of people doesn't really have any hope. By what you've said (turning off by itself, overheating a lot, battery that doesn't count as a battery), I'd say just get a new laptop. Even if you did a system reset (which I fully recommend you do, they help with pretty much everything if you're ok with sacrificing everything you have on there), the laptop's battery and overheating issues won't be resolved. Still, the overheating issue and the issue with it turning off by itself (possibly due to an overload of data or something? might be because of viruses or something) should be much better if you system reset.
 

So an update!

Finally had the time AND inclination to start to tackle this. First I opened all the easy panels etc. and cleaned it out using compressed air etc. checked the battery over and ran multiple good anti-malware and virus scans.

Then since it is an Hp Laptop, I dug around till I found the right boot up shortcuts and forced it to reset to it's semi-hidden partition. It is the equivalent to a full wipe, factory reset and re-install but Hp provides it on all their laptops. Made my life much easier.

After that I made sure everything was installed again and running and did some general tinkering.

Battery now works and has about 8 hours life in it, that is an 8 hour improvement so very happy. Internal fan is working properly again! It starts up quickly and runs things properly now!

The final issue is still that it can overheat. It only overheats now if I play a more complicated game on it and stress it a bit but I haven't gotten into the guts of it yet for a full clean out so there is a chance that can still improve too, it's just damn hard to get fully into this laptop...