IT...have you tried turning it off and on again?

A couple days ago my laptop went crazy. The night before it had installed updates and then the next morning it would not start up. It would get the the black Windows symbol screen and then just sit there forever. I think one of the updates was messed up. I was finally able to get it running in safe mode so I could get my pictures and documents backed up first, just in case, then started working on it to try to find the problem. After hours of work I finally disabled some application and it works mostly normal now. I don't know what the problem with that app is, but hopefully it's not too necessary since it'll remain disabled. I don't want to completely delete it because I think some of my other programs might get messed up if I do. Would have been easier if I'd had a backup point to restore to, but I don't. I need to create one in case I have other problems sometime. The last time I had to do a restore was a couple months ago and one of the kids pulled the plug as it was finishing so that restore point got messed up (luckily after the info had been backed up at least).