My Vaio is acting up..need some advice

[Mavrik]

So my Sony Vaio has been giving me some trouble for the past month or so. It's been having trouble starting. Many of the start up screens freeze when I turn it on, and if I am lucky enough to get past the "Windows XP" screen, I get a box that says "such and such operation failed to run successful" and then my computer will turn off. I also sometimes get a message saying "Windows failed to restart from it's previous location".

It's not a software problem, because I can still load programs, but a few computer-saavy friends I've spoken to suggest it might be a hardware problem. Any ideas from the techies out there?