Windows XP won't boot up. HELP!

Last week I noticed my laptop would get VERY hot on the lower right hand side. Yesterday, during a game (SPORE), cursor became pixilated, screen went black, reboot would give me “Unable to boot. Do you want to start in safe mode”. RESTORE did not work. SONY tells me I have to overwrite my c drive and reinstall the operating system. NO! ANYTHING BUT THAT!! When I try to boot up, I have these pixilated bars running from top to bottom of screen. These bars are not there in SAFE mode. When I start in SAFE mode with networking I can get on the net. What to do?