The laptop has been restored, all is well *touch wood*. One of the tech nerds at work repaired it. He took out the hard drive re-formatted it. Reinstalled the laptop back to it's factory settings Windows 8.1, took a load of bloatware/crapware of it, created a backup/restore point and installed Windows 10. Since then it's been running a lot more smoothly. The edition of Windows 10 I had been running was very glitchy and slow to run software.
The problem I had, was when I installed a cumulative update for Windows 10 and it stalled during it's installation. Then when I tried to login, I was caught within this endless login loop. That's what pissed me off and had me wanting to put my boot through the laptop

I actually like Windows 10, I prefer it to Windows 8.