BleepingComputer.com: Games stopped working

I recently went to play Half-life 2 only to find that it would go to the loading screen and never load. So, I went to try playing quake 4, it also hung at the loading screen. I continued this through a number of games and found that Half-Life 2, Quake 4, Battlefield 2, and Doom 3 all hang at the loading screen. Any help is appreciated.

P.S.
Also, the only browser on my laptop that goes at a reasonable speed is IE. Firefox and Chrome all work well on a few pages but freeze my computer with unresponsive scripts on others.

Thanks!

have you updated any drivers ? if so go back to the ones you had before
also when was the last time you updated windows by windows update ?