The Good News: HP just added an option on there site to order the discs I need to repair my computer, so I ordered them!
The Bad News: The discs might not actually show up to my house until February 26! Currently I am running Linux Mint on my laptop to make it functional but I can't put flash on it, I might have a good enough buffer but you may notice as much as 2 weeks of no comics

I might do some traditional drawings or use whats on here (gimp, inkscape) and make some drawings but I can't make any new comics until my laptop is back to normal with Windows 8 and Flash Cs3, so until then my friends...
If it is just software then it shouldn't be a big problem...
anyway I hope you will get your computer fully functional soon
Actually... well... to be honest I don't know if Win8 has the same way of installation (didn't tried it yet) but winXP had a repair option in it's installation...
you just had to boot from the CD and then continue as if you were trying to overwrite your current installation ... and when it asked if you wanted to overwrite it you just had to choose R - repair... the only thing this did was that the system files were overwritten from the CD so you had to go through all updates again later... but it kept everything else installed on your system MOSTLY intact...
You most probably know this already... but just in case... you have that option...