Hey folks-

Hoping one of you is far more PC literate than I am.  When I boot up my Dell laptop (no jokes about Dell brands, please, just looking for serious answers here), I get what looks to be a vertical trails running up the screen as it boots up, followed by a blue screen of doom just before when it would normally load Windows Vista.  The error message goes by quickly, but it's definitely a video driver problem.  I still have all the original disks, including the device drivers disk, and according to Dell's not quite-fantastic tech support website, it states that I need to reinstall those video drivers.  How can I go about doing this if I can't even get Windows to start?  I think I can get Safe Mode to run, but that's about it.  Any suggestions, ideas, or thoughts are greatly appreciated, as I'm strapped for cash and would like to do this repair from home if at all possible.

I've never used vista but can't you boot up with the vista cd and pick repair? Has helped me a bunch of times with XP

Your graphics card is busted. Replace it. It shouldn't be causing boot up issues however, but I guess it could. This has happened twice to me, once on my 4200ti on my old Dell and once with my 6600GT on my old AMD64 machine. However it would boot up but only at low resolution and would have vertical lines in a pattern with discoloration.