"Security Tools" black screen

I just got hit with this nasty virus on my laptop (XP Pro). A screen came up saying that "Security tools has successfully downloaded, although I didn't download anything. I was just shopping for Christmas (some Christmas present I got!).

I figured it was one of those viruses, so I didn't click on anything except I tried to bring up task manager so I could close the window. That didn't work, it only brought up the full screen of this "security tools" and it started doing the fake scan.

I didn't click anything, but just rebooted in hopes that I could get to either task manager soon enough to close down the program, or to explorer and get to malwarebytes. That didn't work either, the screen came up as soon as I rebooted and it wouldn't let me access anything else, so I shut down again and tried going into safe mode. When doing that, the drivers only go halfway down and stop, then nothing.

I tried just rebooting normally, thinking if I signed up for that security tools with false info, at least I could get rid of the opening screen and access the net. Now when I try to reboot, I get nothing at all, just a black screen. :cry Did I kill my computer by doing this the wrong way? Please help! Thank you in advance.

P.S. This is on my laptop and I do have my desktop that I'm using now. How can I safeguard (with strong preventative measures!) that something like this doesn't happen on this one too?

 

Thank you Chaslang for the welcoming and for your reply, but I decided to just reformat and reinstall. It took me a good day to do it and definitely some headaches, cursing, hair pulling and trial and error, but I finally got it back up (by the way it was XP Pro sp3). The worst was the drivers and going through this, I now know how reinstall a system, at least a Dell Latitude D610.

Thanks to other posts here as well, I ran Malwarebytes on both the laptop and my desktop. I figured the laptop should be clean, which it was, but to my suprise I found 78 infections on my desktop! I also installed Avast and Microsoft's Security Essentials. The project now is to make sure I have the latest drivers for the laptop and a site that helped me a ton too in figuring out which drivers to download to even get it back to basics was www.pcidatabase.com, again thanks to other posts here.

I couldn't have gotten this done without various posts here at Major Geeks, so I thank all of you who've made different posts about these issues and I thank this site for just being here! I'll be a permanent resident now and hopefully can help others in some way too, like you all have helped me.