Fixing the Laptop

My laptop did a curious thing yesterday. I had used it for an hour or so before I shut it down for dinner. When I switched it on after dinner, it stopped boot process in the stage prior to appearance of the start button, taskbar, system tray and desktop. But it opened the My Documents folder and showed its contents. The display was 640X480. I could not do a thing to make it progress. I shut it down and restarted it using Ctrl+Alt+Del to launch Windows Task Manager. It repeated whatever it did before. After this happened three times in a row, I knew I had to do something else. I had prayed in the meantime, but it had not worked too. Then I decided to perform system restore. It sounded like a good idea, but was not easy. The start menu was not accessible, while the shortcut was in accessories. Then I decided to find the executable file in Windows folder. By navigating up the tree in the explorer window of My Documents, I reached the system 32 folder and checked each file. I found Paint.exe and found that I could launch Paint. So if I found the file that restored system, I could launch the utility by double clicking on it. I discovered it was svchost.exe with some flag that should do the trick. But the svchost file stayed calm on double clicking. It was nerly midnight when I had a new idea. I went to C drive, Documents and Settings, Start Menu, and Programs. There I found the Accessories folder, with the system restore shortcut. I double clicked on it. The rest was history. Now the laptop is behaving as if nothing happened yesterday. Another software had declared it has indexing errors, and wants to know if it should fix them the next time the laptop boots. I have told it to hold on until I find out how dangerous it is. The last time I had allowed Norton Utilities to fix errors on my PC, it had fixed the PC such that it would not restart. That was years ago, but the memory is burned indelibly on my mind.