Most likely dying hardware. Hard Drive or possibly RAM.

Since you live in the area now I could probably take a look at it sometime if you'd like. :)

That sounds like a plan. :)

Might be that some of the data on the drive on the drive has gone bad so unless you have data you need to get off that drive just reinstall Windows, if there is data you need to get off that drive there is a $89 dollar program I know of that might help.

There's nothing vital on there, thankfully. Just some minor projects.

Then just go format the drive and put Windows back on it.

Nah, that thing died years ago XD

Pro advice: Buy a new laptop... that piece is sooo outdated.

Depends on what the cost of fixing it is. But yea, most likely, going to buy a new one.

Did you try booting in Safe Mode to see what the problem is? I dunno what else it could be, but I'll ask  eriklepp...if he wakes up soon enough. xP

There are a few things you can do, depends on how critical your data is and how much longer you want to run that laptop.

First, it doesn't sound like a critical mechanical failure, you'd be hearing grinding sounds or as soon as your computer turned on, you'd be getting warnings to backup and replace your hard drive. So there is that.

I would at this point recommend that if you have another computer or know someone that does, look for, download and burn a copy of Parted Magic. Get an external drive that is (at least) as large as the laptop hard drive, boot up Parted Magic and clone your hard drive onto it. That way you have a copy that you could pull the data from before figuring out what is wrong.

As for what is wrong, well it could be more or less anything, I probably could tell you in about ten minutes what it is if I was onsite, so definitely just get someone over that knows their stuff to help you out, otherwise I do have some ideas but without more diagnostics it would all be shots in the dark.

For your sake, I hope it's a simple hard drive corruption but if it isn't, your other choice basically is to buy a new hard drive and install it in the laptop.

One thing you can do is to actually go into the Startup Menu and manually delete any unnecessary startup files. You might need to go to safe mode to do this if you can't get in with that initial prompt.

Also, here's a couple possible help searches I found.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/.....28-9dc4f19a7fa5

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/.....28-9dc4f19a7fa5

I actually had this exact same problem on my dad's computer a few weeks ago with the looping system repair problem. It stated I had a 0xc00000e9 error and what happened was the SATA controller on my motherboard died, which meant it couldnt access any of my SATA hard drives or dvd drives to boot from from correctly. It's more likely for you that a hard drive error occurred and windows isnt reading it properly.

Of course, you can get a new laptop now a days in the $300~ dollar range that would be way faster and more efficient than your current model that that does your everyday basic needs.