Ever since I got my laptop back from the repair shop after replacing my hard drive, at first it seemed like it was good as new, but slowly and slowly it's turning into an unstable machine, and even worse than it was before it threw the BSOD that destroyed my hard drive.

At startup, sometimes it just won't boot up at all. Not even the first HP screen that comes on immediately after I hit the power button comes up. I have to hard reset again and again until it does. Even then, it has a tendency to lock up during boot, BSOD in its attempt to boot, or say that an important file is missing or corrupt, forcing me to hard reset and try again.

Now I'm online and can forget about computer problems, right? Not so fast. I have to treat this laptop like a museum piece or my screen will look like this, freezing up and having to hard reset. I've had to adjust how I type; I cannot lay my hands on the area that surrounds the touchpad or it'll freeze up, meaning I have to type in an uncomfortable way to avoid a 10-minute annoyance and further damaging the laptop. Even then, it'll do it randomly sometimes.

Worse is the BSODs. Even with downloading programs to get to the root of the problem, I don't know what to do. Most if not all the BSODs are centered around "ntoskrnl.exe", which I take is something I absolutely cannot delete from my laptop because it's a very important Windows thing. I have no idea if it's a driver causing it, as there's no way to check my drivers and have a program say "here, this for sure is the driver(s) that's causing the exact problem you're having, here's where you can update or uninstall it" that I know of.

Worse still, suddenly the BSODs are now a problem when I watch something on Livestream, like a good friend's stream, or watching Youtube videos. This wasn't a problem yesterday, but it suddenly popped up today.

And I don't know if it's related, but since I got the laptop back from repairs, the CD/DVD-ROM drive simply does not work, making me even more confused as to how they reinstalled XP on this machine in the first place. It makes the typical noises but nope, nothing. If I have a disc in my laptop at boot up, there's an error that comes up that'll tell me to insert the disc and try again. Meaning that if I want to do my usual music playing whenever I get a new album, or install something like this printer/scanner that I've suddenly decided to hook up, or run the XP recovery console, I'm shit out of luck.

This does not inspire confidence in me that my laptop is going to last to July 2nd, when I leave for AC. That's still a month and plenty of time for the laptop to finally croak from the problems above. Only problem is aside from just enough money to repair the laptop, I'm going to have to choose between a convention that I seriously want to go to to see my friends again after sitting out last year and really beginning to regret that I had to sit out last year, and having a laptop that runs well and isn't using an OS that Windows no longer supports (I don't even have the money set aside to upgrade to something like 7, and I don't know how well this old laptop can handle it). I've got to make it last until then, and even then I'm probably going to run the risk of spending another $125 on another temporary fix, and I suspect they didn't fix anything except replacing the hard drive.

So do any of you tech-savvy people know any way I can fix any or all of these problems without breaking the bank, or am I going to have to send this thing off again?