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.