NEED HELP from a PC wiz !

I have a laptop that I was using and then shut it down ( the proper way ) . I then went to turn the laptop on about 1-2 hours later and it turned on but everytime I put the cursor over something it just made the circular loading cursor . I waited another 5 minutes to see if maybe a program started and slowed down the bootup of the laptop , But nothing . So now I see all my programs on my desktop but I can clicked on any of them . There are NO icons on the taskbar on the bottom right of the screen.

Specs:

HP Laptop
Windows 7 ( I think the cheapest version , but not sure )
4 GIGS of Ram
320 Hard Drive

If anyone can help thanks it means a lot . I might have to bring it to a local PC shop but I really dont trust ANYONE in the Memphis area : /

Odd. Check your boot order make sure everything that you had loading is still loading. Try Google. Best/worst, reinstall windows.

[quote name='AvidWriter']Odd. Check your boot order make sure everything that you had loading is still loading. Try Google. Best/worst, reinstall windows.[/QUOTE]

um........ I am kinda Computer ID1ot ??

Hmmm there might be 2 possible causes:

1) Hard drive is physically beginning to fail.
2) Either Windows 7 OS, some software, or some drivers messed up.

Well I don't have that many suggests for you, you might wanna wait to see if anyone can come up with a better solution first. You can follow my steps as a last resort if nothing works.

*****

What you can do is perform a restore of Windows 7 back to the time when it worked, say, yesterday. First you might want to access the safe mode. So turn on your laptop and keep pressing F8 (in 1 second intervals) on your keyboard until a Windows boot menu appears:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErvIBDR0zZA

Once you get the menu, choose "Safe Mode", should be the first entry, press enter and let Windows boot into safe mode.

When you're in safe mode (assuming it did boot correctly), go to Go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > System Restore and click on it. Windows 7 will suggest you the best restore point, double check to make sure the time and date was when the laptop was working, such as earlier today or even yesterday if possible. Then let Windows 7 do its restoring. This should take about 5 - 15 mins depending on how much data you have. Once its finished it will reboot and just cross your fingers and hope it works.

The above is good advice.
Safe mode is a great way to start troubleshooting.
If it still doesn't boot up correctly in safe mode, it's likely a hardware issue.

Hard drive is probably most likely the problem, however it could be a memory issue too.

What model laptop is it?
How old is it?
All this started happening simply after shutting it off?
Did you ever do any upgrades (Memory for example)?

Could be some malware or something hogging resources, so running a malware/antivirus in safe mode would be an excellent thing to try before resorting to a format.

Malwarebytes anti-malware is a good one that I use.

Microsoft Security Essentials is the antivirus I use at home, but Avast! would be my second choice.