Well, that's my laptop fucked.......

OK, have tried a few things here with my laptop, and it looks like it's totally hosed. Whatever that windows update did, it was bad. It looks like it was trying to do a firmware upgrade and fried the graphics card, 'cos even the bios screen is screwed up. Tried getting into the system restore partition, and was no good, couldn't see it. Tried putting in an opensolaris liveCd and still couldn't see anything, so I know it wasn't just windows. If you can't see your bios screen tho it's a pretty good indication that you're screwed. And to make it even more fun, I took out the HD and put it in another laptop, and now it seems that with all the constant restarts that were happening 'cos of the graphics card being screwed, the windows partition was screwed up as well! Luckily, most of my important files are on the 2nd HD.......

So now I have to go looking for the receipt for the fecking laptop now, and hope the shop I got it in does repairs - if not I have to rely on the tender mercies of HP's customer care dept! Have the machine about 13 months as well so is just out of warranty too :-(