I'm freakin out over here.......

I apologize if this is not posted in the right forum!
Hi everybody,
Something is going on and I'm not sure what it is. I've already lost one machine and I'm afraid that my laptop is on the way to its demise now.
It all began innocently enough, I went to burn a word doc to a cd with my tsst corp (samsung... i think) and it did not recognize my cd and I could not get access to it, so I checked the driver and noticed that it was no longer the original but a MS driver from 2001. Its a gateway so naturally i dont need a driver for an optical drive for xp plus they dont even give out software with today's machines they load it on a partition and if you don't make a backup or restore disk then you're sol, so just say you can now call me SOL. So since i know that people getting their machines hacked is only something that i read in mags or online so i'm safe, well the truth is if i hadn't been in here when it happened i wouldn't have believed it. all of a sudden my hdd starts screamin going all out then i start getting all of these screens poppin up, i cant read'em since i'm across the room so i am bustin but to get to it to hit the zone alarm internet kill button which i do and it calms down and i read one screen that my eset nod 32 had put up saying that someone had gained access to my machine but had not reached the hd, so i feel pretty good.
i run a scan an it removes a couple of things and one thing that it said was that one of the programs was something called _____ _____ The Sherrif and then I reboot feeling fairly lucky about it. well that was the last screen that i saw as it cant find my hal.dll. so my bios is shot and im not sure what else. i do know that i have 6000 pics locked up in a safe place at least its safe from me because its on a hard drive i cant get into. i was thinking about daisy chaining it to another old desktop of mine to see if i could find them to get them off but i am leery about putting that disk in any machine.
so until i figure out what im going to do and get some free time to really screw it up, im in the middle of a semester, i thought that i would use my laptop.
all good right, well i went to burn a doc to my dvdrw dual layer burner on my toshiba satellite r25-s3503 tablet and guess what it won't recognize my cds either. ive tried different types. it will play a music cd and play a movie dvd but i have no access to burn to any disk. this is a little too strange for me. has there been some sort of ms update that would change the drivers as this one has the same driver that my desktop pc had. i also need to find out either how to shut down ms update or control it so it stays away from anything but ms stuff.
if anyone could please give me some advice other than to use this as a frisbee or stay far far away from computers altogether or anything like that. I would be eternally greatful for the assistance and be very indebted to you. i will help anyway that i can but remember i am a poor college student and evidently a stupid one to let stuff like this happen.
Sorry for the length of the post but im really freaked about this and can ill afford to be without my pc.
thanks for any assistance you might be able to offer but thanks for at least reading this.
sincerely,
cal