Potential Crash Caused By Windows Updates On Nuked Sony Vaio?

I recently used DBAN to nuke my girlfriends laptop (a Sony Vaio) after it was rendered near-useless by a virus. I reinstalled Windows 7 and all was well until it came to updating. There was 100+ security updates etc and they were all downloaded and installed automatically. After this the laptop's performance became increasingly worse until a couple of days later it died on us again. I re-nuked it and reinstalled Windows 7. I haven't downloaded any updates and it's working fine now, so my somewhat inevitable question is this: is it possible that one of these updates causing the laptop to freak out? If so, how do I identify it?