programs don't boot up

Today my programs don't boot up.  Instead I get a "circular-looking-thing" at the end of my cursor.  I've owned this Dell Laptop Win7 O/S 6GB Ram for 3 years without many problems and now B-O-O-M!!  I was doing 'something' in msconfig/SERVICES yesterday (1/17/15) but I can't remember quite what it was.  I went back to the RESTORE for Jan 16 and clicked on that.  The machine successfully restored the settings to Jan 16th.  Should I go back further?  Or how else might I fix this?  Right now nothing much boots up, even Chrome, IE or Mozilla.  I'm on another machine.  I can get on the Home Screen OK, but can't do much on there. 

Hello.  If system restore had no effect, I suspect you might be suffering from hard drive failure.  

Step 1 is to make sure you have all your important data backed up.  This is nothing to mess around with.

You didn't provide the model or service tag of your Dell laptop so I cannot provide specific instructions.  However, there is a diagnostic feature on your laptop that can check the hard drive.  You should do so.  This is usually done by pressing F12 immediately after power on to get a boot menu.  You would then choose the utility or diagnostic option.  In there you will find a way to run diagnostics and, if you are given the option, choose extended or long or full tests.  

Specifically, you are interested in the hard drive tests.  Please report back with any error codes, results, or other data you collect.

This link might provide more information about the diagnostic feature you have: http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/SLN115162/EN

So I saw your response and remembered that I had not tried to RESTORE from safe mode.  I decided to try that before the F12 diagnostic and it worked.  I have no idea why.  But once I clicked on again and let the machine start up normally I could boot my programs again.  Thanks for your input.  I know now what I should do if I have hard disk problems.