A tiny glimmer of hope

I've had a thought about my laptop. Maybe the motherboard hasn't blown. Perhaps an essential driver is corrupted. It seems something called pcmcia.sys is having trouble starting. Both network cards rely on it, as does some weird piece of hardware that seems to have recently installed itself. The DVD/CD drive threw a tantrum earlier as well, but I've got it working again. It looks like I can get all my data off the laptop. It's only the communications that have died on it. So I'm going to back everything up to DVD, and attempt to restore it to factory settings, using a special restore partition on the hard drive. If that fails - I'll know it's a hardware failure. But you never know, it may just be the answer. I doubt it, but I'll give it a go.