hello everyone, im new to the forums and need some help

my computer ran fine last night
ive got a dell dimension 3100 with a 3 ghz pentium 4 processor and 256 mg of ram

i start the computer and it takes me to a black screen asking me to choose from
starting it in safe mode
starting in safe mode with networking
starting in safe mode with bios
start with las known god cofiguration
start normally

all of them brought me back to the same screen
windows doesnt load
i then stuck in my windows disk and tried to reboot windows - a clean version
i found that a "hardware installation" screen pops up during install (the insalling windowns part) and freezes my mouse and keyboard, the popup says that sigmatel high definition audio codec hasnt passed windows logo testing and that i should stop ...it asks me if i want to continue the install ... but i cant because everything is frozen. i then tried the windows repair thingy, i ran some tests, and found that something is wrong with my audio, so im thinking some driver or something is missing causing windows to crash

coincedenatally, the last time it was running, i went to shut down and a wndows update thing popped up, it installed itself before shutting down, that was the last time it ran properly
maybe that had something to do with it ?


really sorry for the long post, but i want to make it easy for u guys to see where im at.

btw, i havent installed anything else, or changed any kind of hardware configuration prior to this...

any help would be great
Thanks!