crash and burn

Okay, here's the basic "oops". I have a compaq laptop, Anthion 4 AMD. Last night while playing a game on line with a friend, the computer shut itself down, then came back (by itself) in DOS asking if I wanted to start in safe mode, etc. I decided it best to try that. But when I did that it started to run through files and freeze up. Only removing all power sources got it to shut down completely. I re-powered it up, and it started to bring up the normal windows welcome screen, and then switched on it's own to the blue error screen for a second, then to the DOS screen asking again for safe mode start up. After trying this a few times, I determined that it wasn't ever going to do what I asked of it. The only way to shut it down after starting is to pull the power. There is no way to get to any kind of start screen right now that I can see. I'm fearing that it's toast. Any thoughts? I used to run ad ware and virus protection, but even then it ran at almost full memory all the time, and I'm not sure if removing those didn't help this situation at all. Thanks for any help or other comments. I can take it, I'm a guy.

 

Oh yeah, for the other information, it has a tiny 128m memory stick in it. Nothing fancy like this one, but it still used to work okay.