My laptop is a piece of ....

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Buy a can of compressed air and blast every venting hole you can find in your laptop with full force.

Sometimes that blows chunks of dust off. Sometimes the blockage requires dismantling the whole laptop.

[Ghosth]

FYI you can do a google search for your laptop. Find out which motherboard it has, then research that. Find the drivers for it and video.

The more you can do prior to doing a wipe the easier it will be.

[Skuzzy]

You can take a any licensed OEM copy of Windows XP and build a disk for a laptop using slipstream along with the drivers for the laptop.

A bit more complex than I really want to detail, but you can Google around to find out about it.

I recently built a Windows XP w/SP3 for a Toshiba laptop due to the original XP disc being lost.  They had to buy the regular XP disc in order for that to be done.  I just located all the drivers and built a new XP disc.