Windows 7 Service Issues

My sister recently got a laptop (unsure of the model, but I know it's from Gateway), with Windows 7 on it. Everything had been working fine, until this morning when she started it and the display seemed to be very scaled down. The taskbar was gray, and looked similar to how Windows 98 looked. Upon looking into it, I found out that nearly all of her services were disabled. I tried running a system restore, but was unable to. I googled the error message, and attempted to fix the issues, but I'm still unable to run a system restore. I decided to boot in safe mode to see if it would be possible to system restore from there. As the computer was booting, I hit F8. However, instead of coming up with the boot menu, it said that Windows was unable to Startup properly, and gave me the option to either run Startup repair, or to boot normally. I figured that I'd just run startup repair. Startup repair has been running for about ten minutes now, and the only notification that it's given me is "attempting repairs." At one point it gave me the option to run a system restore, so I chose to do that. However, nothing appeared to happen. So startup repair is still running, and nothing appears to be getting done.

At this point we're figuring we're just going to take it to Best Buy to see what they can do, but ideally we'd like to be able to fix it without having to throw down too much cash.

Any help you guys can offer would be greatly appreciated.

So startup repair just finished, and it has given me the message that "Startup repair cannot repair this computer automatically." I'm shutting it down and I'm going to try to boot in safe mode again. I'm not sure if the failure to start was from me pressing the F8 key, or was just completely coincedental. Anyway, this whole situation is really lame.

Okay, I booted in safe mode and was able to run system restore. I'm going to cross my fingers and see how everything works out from here.

System restore worked, and everything appears to be back to normal. Feel free to lock/decimate this thread.

Edit: If anyone knows why this happened, feel free to share that information. I'm glad that everything's back to normal, but I really want to know why this happened.

Virus I'd say.

I've never heard of a virus doing that to Win7, or any machine, but my experience w/ viruses is, luckily, not too extensive. The way you describe it in the OP almost sounds like she accidentally started the machine in Safe Mode.

You might want to run something like Malwarebytes and scan w/ your antivirus to make sure there's nothing hiding on the machine.

Aaaaand..........

:lock: