Hanging Startup + Kernel Inpage Data Error

Bought a Dell laptop with Windows XP for college last semester. She's had it for about six months now and earlier today upon startup it hung for a very long time (about 20 minutes). She rebooted it to the same results. I tried doing the only thing I knew how which was booting it in safe mode, which gave me a brief flash of a blue screen before restarting. I went to safe mode again so I could make out what the error message was before the computer restarted itself and I saw that it said KERNEL_INPAGE_DATA_ERROR. There's an error number at the bottom, but the screen flashes by so fast that I can't make it out. Anyway, it's been a few hours and startup is still hanging. I have tried booting it in the last good settings mode and nothing seems to work. I'm not very PC savvy (yes, I am a mac user :P) and my limited knowledge doesn't really help in this situation. I asked her if she had deleted any files which might cause a startup problem and she said that she hadn't. She uses the computer strictly for her iPod, printing papers, and burning the occasional CD. There are a few harmless games which have been downloaded for a long time now, but I don't think that she recently installed any software that could cause a kernel inpage data error, whatever that is. Her most recent piece of installed software is for her new phone, but even that was a week ago. When this problem started, the laptop wasn't very hot so I don't think that would be a problem either.