Pinguy OS 12.04 64bit - Utterly brocken system

Hi all,

I run a Pinguy OS 12.04 64bit (AMD 64bit, SSD as the boot device) system and the system seem to be totally broken.

It happened to freeze to me - meaning seemingly no mouse movement, no key stroke seem to have reached the system (yes, the hardware works fine....), no nothing - just a still picture of the desktop.
I thought that these things were a thing of the previous windows experience but it can happen with Linux too...

I am not aware of anything special I have been doing to the system at all.. I do run updates regularly.

Eventually I did not know it better but after a while I had to power off the system by using the switch. After that the system did not boot really.... lost inodes all over the place.

Now, it does boot into desktop - but it shows some 'mircocode updates' missing or failing... but the desktop is dead. It comes up, I can use the mouse but nothing more... Docky fails to start...and so on...
It seems to just have stopped...just the mouse pointer can be moved around.

First and foremost - What can I do about it!?
How can I fix this?

And how can something be prevented in the future?
What should be done (and what are the don'ts) in a case the computer was turned off (by intention or accident)?

Thanks,
LNT