Some Insight into a Problem? (Laptop won't start... Again)

So my laptop didn't start this morning, but fortunately (ha) this has happened before, so I was able to boot from a Vista Recovery disk and repair the startup. It seems, this time, there was an "unspecified error" and it simply performed a System Restore (I couldn't even launch in Safe Mode so I wasn't able to do it manually). Here's the LINK to my old thread.

Problem is, this time, I hadn't really done anything to warrant this kind of behaviour. I was lanning Medieval 2 for the first time with my friend, but no new software or hardware was installed recently. The only thing I can think of is how my laptop gets quite hot during gaming, and the fact that I was playing on a bed using textbooks under my laptop to ensure airflow, and another as a mousepad (no one said $90 textbooks weren't useful). I was a little worried I may have fried something, but then, that would have caused permanent damage, no? So here I am. If anyone has any insight I'd love to hear them. Also posting this as a solution, in case anyone else has a laptop that doesn't start.