Install Windows Error, Acer Laptop

First, my laptop is a Aspire 5250-BZ853. I received it back in October, I think...may've been earlier. But anyhow, it was working just fine yesterday until I did a Windows Update. I had to restart, and it was fine again. But then it began running sluggishly slow, and just terrible overall so I restarted it once more and that was when the problems began.

This entire day, this has been driving me nuts. I have important files on here, and I backed up most on my external harddrive a bit ago but there were a few I missed and hadn't the chance to get (ironically enough the most important, papers and such.) At first, it said my password was wrong -- as if someone had changed it! I restarted it once more, thinking it an error or something, and did that again so I restarted it again. Finally, it worked but I think it logged me in as safe mode somehow. After that, it restarted on its own and began this loop. I did a LOT of searching on Google until finally someone suggested to someone else to try pressing "ALT + F10" I think it was as it was starting, and finally I made progress. Before that, it was just going into a constant rebooting loop and I couldn't even log into safe mode. Trying to reset it back to a time it was working was futile, because it said there was no recovery time there! So that shot that idea down. At last, I got somewhere.

But then that was shot as well. I clicked the reset to factory settings, but still keep all the files (and they would be saved to "C:\Backup" and I thought it had finally worked. But now as it reinstalls, I got an error saying something about how it needed to restart or something...so when I clicked "okay" it began again, and finally it all just came to a stop on "Windows could not complete the installation. To install Windows on this computer, restart the installation."

I'm completely dumbfounded, because every time I click "okay" it just acts as if it's resetting things, and then comes to that. I also do NOT have the recovery disk -- not sure where it went...almost positive my little butt of a brother did something with it, so that's just considered hopeless in retrieving it in my eyes.

Any ideas? Apologies for the long-winded explanation! Been a long day.