9860 continuosly blue screening after start-up

Hey everyone,

History: the computer was purchased/received Dec of last year. It has been reformatted once (I believe I did it in April last). One week ago I switched over to SBC and everything has been working fine until Friday. I took it to school (its a requirement) and connected to their network (as I always do) and there were no problems. Once I came home and turned it on, it started blue screening me and when it did not blue screen it would perform very slowly and lock up before able to do anything on it. Friday night, I finally got it working (I think it was just patience though, not expertise) and the windows crash summary had told me that the video driver was faulty. So i went and downloaded the newest video driver on sager's website and after downloading, I clicked the box to install it. It didnt take me to any other screens though, it just exited (so I figured when I rebooted it would bring it back up or it simply didnt require any more user input).

The idiot that I am, then shut down the computer before retiring to bed friday night (..doh... ). Now the computer will only operate in safe mode (and is very slow at that). I must have restarted this thing over 100 times (I have tried everything).

Bios: I thought that I would try to update my bios b/c I noticed in one of the blue screens that it mentioned that there was possibly outdated bios that should be updated. Once again, I went to Sager's website and downloaded the latest driver and the winphlash utility to flash the bios (yes, I have been operating on the same bios as the day it was received).

Winphlash: I downloaded it and installed it but when I go to use it to flash the newest bios (actually there is a newer one but the reasoning of not getting it has left my mind...it is a little to early I guess) and it says it cannot find a file. The filename is "PHLASHNT.SYS".

If I didnt not have anything important on my computer I would just reformat it and call it a day. Yet, I cannot do this b/c I am in pharmacy school and have finals coming up next week and alot of projects/presentations/homework/etc... that is due this week. Once again, I am an idiot and didnt save this information to a DVD-R (probably performed 2 months ago and lots of stuff has been added/changed since). I also have lots of music and pictures on here that have not been updated since 2-3 months ago (again, lots have been added since)

I am sorry this is so long, but I wanted you to have the whole story and I guess I get "typative" when I am tired and aggravated.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, I have already tried the last point of good configuration option (twice actually) and it will not even get to the logon screen, it shuts down immediately after the initial Windows XP screen comes on.

I was going to run a system restore, but I am an idiot and wanted to have max performance/storage and turned it off (I am kicking myself as we speak/type). I have never needed to use it, so I figured it wasnt much a risk. After thinking about it, I also have house and car insurance and I keep them (so why would I have not kept the system restore). Who knows what I was thinking.

I will try to run that check disk. It has been blue screening about a minute and a half after logon, so i should have time to perform the check disk function (by the way: thanks for mentioning that b/c it has been such a long time that I have performed that, that I had forgotten all about it (and how to do it as well)).

I will try the check disk and reply back my findings.

Ok,

I ran the chkdsk function and it found no problems.

I quickly caught a fewparagraphs in the blue screen talking about:
1) video driver (I have never upated my video drivers). After the first blue screen, I was able to get it back on after an hour of patience and I updated the video driver, I was going to remove it but I cant find it in the add/remove programs document to get rid of it and try it as it originally was.
2) Bios: it is telling me to update my bios (which I have not been able to do b/c the winphlash I keep downloading keeps telling me it is missing a winphash.nt (or something like that), so I cant perform the bios upgrade
3) insufficient memory. I know it is not the hard drive memory b/c I have like 80g's left. Do you think the ram in my video card is going out for just my regular ram. At start up it shows that I have all of my ram, but do you think that some is not working?

Also, I can get into to it in safe mode. So, I was just going to burn everything I have to disks and reformat, but it wont recognize my DVD burner (hooked up via 1394) or even my internal CD-R for that matter.

Also, i went have ran a virus detection (McAfee) and it found no viruses, spyware, adware, etc... Yet, I tried to update it and it is not allowing it to update. Also, my firewall is being turned off about 25 seconds after startup, then my virus protection shuts off and the computer eventually blue screens a minute or two later. I decided to go online and let McAfee online search my computer for viruses, the only viruses it had found were ones that my virus protection had quarantined, so I went ahead and deleted them.

Is there another way to update my bios??? Or anything else I can do. Also, I have removed everything to do with SBC b/c I was afraid that it was what was shutting off my firewall, but I am still having the same problem.

I basically have my life on that laptop and cannot just reformat it (to think that I was planning on backing everything up next week after finals too).