Laptop only works in safe mode

OK, I dropped my laptop. Everything appeared to be working fine afterward. Have a Compaq running Vista but with only 1 gig of ram. A little slow starting and shutting down but I'm OK with that. Was online wireless through a home router. A desktop running XP was also hardwired through the router. Left and came back later. Both machine's displays had gone black. Had to restart by pressing the power buttons. The desktop seems to have no ill effects. The laptop now freezes about 2 minutes after start up. It seems to be as soon as it finishes loading everything. In safe mode it seems fine. Tried a system restore to 7 days earlier, didn't help. Don't know if I'm dealing with some kind of malicious file or damage from dropping it.

 

Have you had any storms recently? Sounds silly, but a power surge can have the effects you're describing.

Also, dropping a laptop, if nothing is directly damaged, would normally only affect moving parts: the hard drive and optical drive.

 

No storms. No surges. As I said, everything works normally for about 2 minutes.

 

I discovered that it will slow down and eventually stop responding in safe mode as well. It just takes a long time. Should I re-post this as a software issue or malware? I posted to hardware because it started after I dropped it.

 

OK, I don't seem to be getting any responses to this but since I don't want to start a new thread, Ill try again. I'm pretty sure I have a hardware issue. Possibly and likely heat related. Possibly, but not likely, related to the laptop being dropped. It boots up fine. After about 2 minutes the screen freezes/stops responding. I can still move the cursor around. In safe mode, it takes 15-30 before this happens. Maybe even longer depending on what I'm doing. I think the things I first listed are just coincidences. I'm leaning towards heat related because it was set to stay on with the lid closed because of a download that was going to take a long time. My wife put it in the case not knowing it was on. I just found out about this. What can I do to find out what, if anything, is damaged.