Unusual problem on shutdown/startup

[The Packrat]

Yesterday when I went to shut down my computer, it froze. Not seeing any alternative, I manually powered it down. When later attempting to turn the machine on, I received an error (with no specific error message) saying that it was unable to startup successfully, and presented me with a menu for running diagnostics, backing up data, resetting to factory defaults, etc.. Being very short on sleep at the time, I decided "I'll deal with this tomorrow" and shut it down.

Just now, when powering up to try to deal with it, it started up fine. Had it been someone else on my computer yesterday, I would never guess anything had gone wrong. Thing is, without having done anything to fix the issue, I'm worried there might still be a problem with my machine, since I've been told failures to boot properly usually indicate something serious.

The computer is an HP Pavilion dv7-6b55dx running Windows 7 64-bit service pack 1. I ran a virus scan and it came up clean, and a spyware scan is running as I type this.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Currently very worried about having to turn off or restart this machine in the future.

(Apologies if this is in the wrong section, but not knowing what, exactly, the problem is, I wasn't sure where else to post it.)

 

[xtreme5]

remove out all the rams and clean your system of dusk entirely.

 

[The Packrat]

It's not even 3 months old. Could enough dust have accumulated in that time to cause an issue?