Oh Dear!

So Alix's laptop was misbehaving and after lots of talking to tech support they said I should run Acronis and put it back to factory settings and all would be well!

Never believe a man you can't see, suffice to say after running it four times (Are you sure it wasn't interrupted? Is it plugged in to the power supply? Yada, yada, yada) and subsequently failing to even load an operating system they then decide it must be a hardware fault and it has to go in for repair. Splendid. It's not even a year old. Fortunately it's under warranty.