Unable to boot

A couple days ago, I was browsing sp/fb like I normally do, while DLing Tespia. In the middle of a webpage, my laptop crashed and showed a blue screen for a split second, and I was unable to read what it said. When I tried rebooting my laptop, it had some error message and a repair button. The repair button did nothing, but told me my CI.dll file was corrupt. I went to bed at this point and was planning on fixing it the next day, but my dad tried to fix it. He said he was able to boot into safe mode (F8), but then he tried installing windows updates. This caused the computer to restart, and then it became unable to load past the black screen with the blinking _ in the upper left corner.

It has been like this ever since. I called ASUS tech support, and the guy basically told me I was screwed and had to buy a notebook recovery software CD.

I have spent the past three days trying to figure out what else I can do to fix this, and managed to find that a corrupt CI.dll was a red herring, and that it was actually some virus or whatever. Several forums suggested downloading malware removal programs to cleanse my computer by running a free OS from a flash drive (I'm typing this on my laptop using Ubuntu from my flash drive), but none of the programs work. TDSSkiller gets stuck at 15% (checking for updates) and Malware bytes' anti-malware gives me some sort of error while running the scan.

F8 and F9 while starting the computer no longer works, but I am able to press F2 which is how I load Ubuntu from the flash drive.

I'm basically wondering what else I can do since I pretty much rely on this laptop for everything and I'm not really in the mood to wait a week for the recovery disc (online tracking says 08/05 arrival).
Also, I had a backup created a couple days before this happened, so I'm all down for wiping stuff.

Laptop:
ASUS G73Jh
Windows 7 Home Premium

Note that I have little to no clue about computer software/hardware, so if I say anything stupid or if I left out helpful information, let me know. SP has some pretty computer-savvy people so I am hoping someone can help, or possibly confirm that my only option is to wait for the CD.

Well, there's a few ways you can go about fixing it.

Firstly and probably the easiest(at least to me) would be that - since you have backups - to go ahead and do a full reinstall.

Another suggestion would still require an installation CD(if you don't have one you could probably download one) and run the repair from the CD instead of the built-in option you reportedly no longer have access to.

Also try clearing all the settings in the BIOS - I'm assuming you can still get to that. The BIOS may be listed as "enter setup" on the first boot screen you see where you hit F2.