Windows Won't Load

[dyingatmidnight]

HI there, I'm here to request help with my Toshiba Satellite Laptop.

So here's the story, I was playing a Nancy Drew video game and I was a little stuck therefore I was tabbing between Firefox and the game. At one point while trying to do this the screen went black and nothing would respond. Alt+Ctrl+Del, the Windows Key, ESC. So I tried shutting it down, at first it merely went into standby, but right before it did it would show my wallpaper and the stand by screen. Once I shut it off and restarted it it would not load windows. This is the message it gave me.

STOP: c0000218 (Registry File Failure)
The registry can not load the hive (file):
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\Software
or it's log or alternate. It is corrupt, absent or not writable
and then it dumps physical memory.

I was unable to load Safe Mode, or the last known working config or XP CD to repair but it wouldn't even get to the Welcome to Setup screen. I get this instead. We apolgize blah blah, load in safe mode, blah blah and under Technical Info it has:

STOP: 0x0000007E (0x0000005, 0x748E0BF, 0xF&8DA208, 0x78D9F08)

pci.sys - Address F748E0BF base at F7487000 DateStamp 3B7855C.

Is there a way for me to fix this, is it a Windows Error or did I just fry my video card!! Help Please!

 

[raybay]

First, press the power button for 20 seconds to shut down all the electronic processes. Then wait a bit... another 20 seconds to a minute.
Cold boot to SAFE MODE by tapping the <F8> repeatedly once per second until it boots. If this works, you will get a very slow boot, and an extremely low resolution screen.
You are doing this to test your hard drive and your video graphics with the least possible install of other components.
While doing this, take note of any beeps that result. If this works, you can shut down and reboot normally to see if it will boot that way.
If you get nothing on your screen in safe mode, you have either a failed video graphics, failed video driver, failed hard drive, failed power supply, or one memory module may have gone bad.

You likely have a hard ware problem: hard drive, memory, power supply or video graphics. Determining if this is so will take some time, and a number of attempts to test various components.

Tell us the brand and model of your system, and the age of the hard drive. We will need to know as much as possible to make some perhaps helpful guesses that will be useful.

 

[dyingatmidnight]

Thanks for getting back to me. Had I waited to try this... oh well.

I found my default backup disks that came with the laptop and just decided to reset everything. There wasn't anything really important on it anyway, just vids and music, all that I can get again if need be. So far it seems to be working fine, Windows is open and working, in fact I'm responding from the laptop. So chances are if it were infact a hardware problem that just resetting defaults wouldn't have fixed the problem, right?

It's a Toshiba Satellite A100, it's a bit over a year old. It seems to be working fine now, like I said, but I would like to make sure everything is in working order. Is there anything you can recommend for me to do that?