Crazy browsing performance w wife's laptop

My wife has an Acer Aspire 7645 running Win 7 Home Pro with 4 gigs of RAM. She doesn't use her computer often and she's sloppy with its maintenance and hygiene. Today she tried to open her gmail account and found that it would not load. It says "establishing secure connection" and then hangs. This shows up on all browsers. Yet, on other sites she loads quickly and without trouble. It depends on the site. For instance, when I try going to virtualdr.com I see "waiting for googletagservices.com". What? I've done a System Restore. No change. I've tried to DL CCLeaner, but browser won't take me to the download page. It just hangs. I know this is pretty broad as a descriptive process but I've never encounter this kind of behavior before. Any ideas? I unplugged and re-plugged our router too. My own desktop works just fine.

Thanks!

You could download MalwareBYtes on another computer, then put it on a flash drive to transfer it to the problem computer and run it there. If it finds anything, it might be time for a malware removal thread.

This is malware that prevents you going to those pages.

jdc has posted the work around most folks use.

Safe Mode with networking is my common method of getting it and installing it when garbages stops thing from working right.

I ran MalwareByte, found 16 bugs, ran the program. After that the computer worked fine for a few minutes and I thought Eureka! then it clunked. Spontaneous restart and I was back to where I was before. I may have a failing HD here, but I'm tired of messing with it tonight. I'll take another look tomorrow.

Seagate.com > Tips for testing and finding out whether a drive is faulty.