Worms ...................

The laptop died during the week - it was very slow to come on, very slow to do anything, lots of error messages, Google chrome didnt work properly then I got a message to reboot as there were serious security issues

Only, it wouldnt come back on again, it tried and would get as far as the welcome page and then black bank screen again

To cut a long story short was told it was a virus/worm of the worst kind. Lost everything on it including photos. Yes I know I should have did back ups but I didnt. It had to be reformatted

The annoying part is, it was rarely used as since I got the netbook, it has been idle, only put it on to top up my iTunes account

Got it back tonight with a wee upgrade to Windows 7.

Now I will have to contact Apple as my iTunes account was on it and havent a clue how to reactivate it.

A couple of points...

A Linux Live CD is a vital tool when you have any system that, for whatever reason, won't boot. You can just boot from the CD or a live image on a USB drive and then copy your data to external media until you can get the machine in question back up and running. Which, of course, is fine if you know about the possibility of doing that before someone re-installs for you...

Even then, there may well be recoverable photos and other files after a reformat and re-install. Photorec might be able to find something...

The above revelation about the ease of file recovery is why if you're giving old hardware away or selling it or whatever, don't assume that just deleting files or even reformatting will wipe your data. It won't!!! To really blank a disk beyond hope of recovery you need to use Dban or something similar. No need to go physically destroying disks. It makes me mad when I see that advice! Destroying perfectly good hardware is criminal in my book!

And now you know the importance of keeping up to date on Panacur doses!
Seriously though, sorry you lost stuff - lesson learnt the hard way, back things up!

Like it! Better still, use a computer system who's physiology doesn't allow worms to get a hold in the first place!

Try This

Start C

Press f11

Click restore.

A restore might have been an option. Reading the original post, a complete re-install/upgrade (If you believe changing versions of Windows is in any way an upgrade...) has been done.