Hard Drive Problem???

Hello, This is my first posting

I am witting this in hope that I will have some form of help with some
problems that has happened to my laptop computer since I received it on
December 25th, 2006..

On Saturday morning 01-13-07, I was doing routine updating of the Windows XP and Windows Media Center via Microsoft's Windows Update feature located on the Start Menu. After receiving an update from Microsoft, the computer showed a notice to the effect of "In order for the updates to take effect, your computer must be restarted." The computer then shut down and went into a normal start-up routine by first bringing up the BIOS. However, when the computer normally switches from the BIOS to Windows, nothing happened except for to period dots and a dash line were displayed in the upper left hand corner of the screen.

Since Windows did not load, I contacted Alienware Tech Support people and I explained the problem and was asked to press the F-5 key as the system was booting up, nothing happened.

I was then directed to power off the machine, insert the Alienware Microsoft
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 System Recovery DVD-ROM disk and I was directed to delete the only partition on the drive, and reinstall Windows XP Media Center Edition. As the system was reinstalling Windows XP Media Center Edition, I was instructed by the operator, once Windows was installed, I would need to reinstall the drivers from the Alienware Support CD, followed by reinstalling NERO 7 Essentials Software and finally, CyberLink's Power Cinema Linux CD.

After installing all of the software, I noticed that the AlienGUIse was not
reinstalled, Intel Pro Wireless was not reinstalled, and there was no
CyberLink's Power Cinema available......all three of these were on the laptop when it was shipped from your factory.

Saturday night, I was able to download and install AlienGUIse from
Alienware.com and Intel Wireless Pro from Intel.com, CyberLink Power Cinema was not reinstalled and thus I am unable to play DVD movies on the laptop at this time. I also reinstalled Office and my anti-virus, spyware, and firewall - Anti-virus is from Trend Micro and both Spyware and Firewall from Webroot.

Yesterday morning, while I was surfing the net at a coffee shop that has free
WIFI access, the computer began to do an update for AOL, which was installed less than 12 hours earlier. Again the same message of "In order for the updates to take effect, your computer must be restarted." Once the computer came back on, it again went to the BIOS screen and then got stuck trying to load Windows as stated previously.

I thought this might be the cause of a computer virus or some other problem
that my existing Anti-Virus / Internet Security program was missing, and I
traveled to CompUSA to select some new and up-to-date anti-virus / internet security program (Trend Micro Internet Security). I described my problem to the technician there and he stated I should contact Alienware's tech support at once due to the problem. Which I did.

While waiting for the tech support people to respond back, I went ahead and reinstalled XP Media Center again. After which I installed the new internet security suite that I had just bought, and once again, it restarted the computer - goes to BIOS, and then locks as it is supposed to start windows.

What is going on here? Anyone have a fairly decent idea......also Lojack for Laptops was installed, but that was over a week ago and only had problems as of Saturday.

Is this a hard drive issue, a memory controler issue, or is there some virus on there that didn't go away?

Thanks for any help.

 

Found this....(.google .22seconds)
Seems to be specific to KB908250 and KB910393 from Windows Update. and Xp windows media center edition.

http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/11/30/498570.aspx

 

Thanks for the intel, I think I'll manually install all of the items 1 by 1 instead of Microsoft doing it for me. Thanks.