I guess my laptop is officially broken. I am currently digging for my Dell Support CDs to reinstall Vista on it, but I don’t really think that will help at all(except with the Dell support people).

I do credit the crashes to my hardware simply because I’ve been a Vista user on multiple machines since day 1 and know how rock solid the OS really is.
I suspect the mainboard of my laptop to be faulty in some way.

The funny thing is (besides that my laptop fails to boot 50% of the time), I am still doing active development on that machine.
It works, I see some weird errors sometimes, but I can still work normally on the system once it’s booted.