[jumbowif]

Hi There, I've recently had Vista ultimate complete with Office 2007 installed on my much loved VAIO. The specs are as follows:

Sony VAIO VGN-BX296XP. 1.86 Single core Centrino. 120GB HDD. 2GB RAM (Upgraded from 1GB). ATI Radeon700 256MB.

I've had Vista on the machine for 2 weeks now and I was still missing 4 drivers as indicated by 'Driver Detective V.6'. The machine was still running fast & fault free except for the inability to play DVD's in media player so I found & down loaded a new driver for the ATI Radeon for Vista, but this still did not solve the DVD playback problem.
I ran Driver Detective again & it suggested that there was an even more up to date driver available, however I was having trouble getting it due to slow connection speed - I'm stuck on an offshore drilling rig in Angola at the moment!
While running DVD Ghost last night the machine crashed with the Blue screen message saying something about a BIOS problem.
Now the machine will not boot up in safe mode as when the screen appears the keyboard will not respond, so it simply counts down 30 seconds then reboots windows normally. I then get the user log on screen OK, however once Vista starts up it'll run for up to a minute before locking up, not giving me a chance to do anything of use.
I've tried booting the machine up with the Vista installation disc in, however as the keyboard does not respond, I am unable to boot from it when it prompts me to press any key.
I'm stuck for ideas..... HELP ME SOMEONE PLEASE!

[Rollin' Rog]

When you press and hold the F8 option to get the Safe Mode choice -- is there not also a "repair" option which includes System Restore? I believe this runs outside of Windows and so should not be bogged down by anything currently starting up.