This computer repair horror story should come as no surprise to many users of similar technology.

The moral of the story? While you may be hesitant to spend money on Fort Lauderdale computer repair, you can't necessarily trust, nor count on, the software pre-installed on your computer. Here's why ...

An old Lenovo laptop started acting odd in that some programs actually worked, but not all. What was the cause?

If it was malware, no scanner could detect it. The Registry? Three different Registry repair programs found and repaired all sorts of inconsistencies without positive effect.

After a week or so, reformatting the hard drive and restoring Vista grew to appear as the only viable option. Or so one would think.

After all the proper backups, it should be easy to use that partition to restore everything on the hard drive to its factory state. Except if you no longer have or can't find the partition that allows for this.

How would you know that Rescue and Recovery doesn't necessarily rescue or restore anything? Two phone calls and three hours of IT support later, everyone was offering the same explanation: recovery programs will accomplish their stated task if the operating system on your PC matches the one on the backup.

The long and short of it: Don't trust the recovery tool that came with your PC. Make an image backup when Windows is healthy, and make it with a third-party program and stash it away in a safe place.