Yo, a geek here that needs help big time. My best friend recommended me to a cute friend for some computer help so she gave me the laptop. I jumped right into it but dang man all I got were grief!!!

When I start up, the logon screen came up, etc, clicked, etc. then the background came up but there's no task bay, system tray, or any icons! I decided to boot up into Safe mode and it worked. Now I found out the window XP is SP1. my god, I had to update it to sp2 before I can do anything so I did that but right middle of that, it turned off then turned back on saying the installation were interrupted.

Now I booted it up in normal mode, strangely enough it worked, everything were where it should have been. But after 2 minutes, I got BSOD saying IRQL_Not_Less_or_equal with 0x0000000a etc. I googled it on my other computer but every solution involves Desktop.

It is Inspiron 8600 laptop. I will appreciate any help because I want to look good. In fact this is my first recommendation!
What the hell should I do? Should I do a clean installation or what?

In the bsod screen, does it give a list of files? If so, it will give a clue to which file or driver is causing the problem.
Then try booting in safe mode (press F8 during boot) to correct the problem.

This may also have to do with an incompatibility issue. SP2 has been known to cause many of these. If you have any USB devices plugged into the laptop, try removing them during the installation. After SP2 is installed, then try to manually configure those devices.