Ok... so... after a week of my computer being down and backing up files and everything my friend came over to reinstall the hard drive. I figured for shits and giggles I'd let it boot up normally just to see what would happen. I fully expected it to stall while booting windows like it had been this whole time. Well this time round it works like a charm. Windows informed me that it had crashed after a fatal error occurred. I had it run a diagnostic to see if could tell me what had gone wrong. Apparently my video card stopped working, but now was working fine... We're guessing that the video card had come loose at some point and so it wasn't fully connected, which was causing windows to freak out and have an aneurysm every time I turned the computer on. When we reinstalled the hard drive and put everything else back into place we must have fully reattached the video card. Thus everything works again.

So my computer broke, but in a way that could have been fixed in 5 minutes if we'd known what was wrong, but since we didn't we assumed it was something worse than it was and thus we ended up spending a week trying to fix it the hard way. Well as far as things it could have been much worse and much more expensive. So I'm just annoyed at myself since the solution was so easy. So I'm going on mostly full cylinders again. My ancient monitor finally crapped out on me so I'm looking for a replacement. Once I have two monitors again I'll be set, but the main thing is I'm back in business.