Toshiba Laptop running Vista home edition .
Switch on and get the password screen , then accepts password and get the rotating ring of blue . Thats as far as it gets .
Hit F12 on start up and run in ‘Safe’ mode, it fires up almost everything fine , no sound though .
Tried system restore and that fails .
It recomends starting things in sequence, like Apollo 13 , to see what crashes the system , but I have no idea how to do that .

Any tips ?

Try reinstalling the drivers whilst in safe mode or if you’ve had a recent un-install it.

In safe mode, open the command prompt and type msconfig. This will give you a wee program that let’s you stop loading program’s at startup. Disable everything, reboot and if it works, add then one by one. Or if it’s just happened, open program’s in control panel, order by install date and uninstall the last program or update.