Windows 7: Potential crash caused by windows updates on nuked Sony Vaio?

Hi all,

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?

I've been searching a few forums for an answer but no one seems to have had a similar enough problem for me to be able to take advice from, so if anyone could help it would be thoroughly appreciated: there's few things more frustrating than an uncooperative laptop!

Always install teh proper drivers for the system first - go to the Sony website for them

try installing the Offline SP1 (if you installed RTM) rather than using WU - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5842

If you're updating from an SP1 install, do about 5-10 at a time (and reboot between batches), but leave the .NET updates until last, and install them one by one in order of release date (NOT KB number!), with reboots between each.