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Don't know if it's related to this, but a couple of weeks ago my wife was having some problems with her laptop (Windows 8.1) so I tried to run System Restore back to a point a couple of months ago.

A message came up ... System restore failed while scanning file system on drive C. Drive might be corrupt. Try System Restore after chkdsk /R on this disk. Unspecified error occurred (0x81000204).

I wasn't sure how to do that chkdsk thing, so right now she is just borrowing my laptop. Any ideas for how I might help get her rolling again?

> ...I wasn't sure how to do that chkdsk thing...

Before anything else, please attempt to take a full backup of the disk, onto an external drive.

You need to do this with administrator privilege, so do it while logged in as the Administrator, or a user who is a member of the Administrators Group.
Open a Command Prompt ("DOS-box") window.
Type this command:
chkdsk /f /r
Hit Enter.
Answer the question in the affirmative (type y).
Exit from the command prompt.
Restart (reboot) the computer. The CHKSDK program will run before Windows comes up. It will print a lot of status information for your amusement. Hopefully it will fix any problems it finds. Depending on the size of your disk and how much stuff is on it, CHKDSK could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.
As soon as possible, take another full backup of the disk onto an external drive.