How about an actual horror story? Diary of a "Computer Won't Boot" Ticket.

Hey now, at least it's a damn sight better than that horrid 9-year old OS with the default blue fisher-price theme. Personally I prefer 7, though that's mostly because of the dock (being a mactard, that's what I call it).

Vista's only problems are being memory hungry and requiring authorization to do anything, it works fine.

Rogue Traders?

Let me guess: you're a middle aged 'soccer mom' whose favourite game is minesweeper? Either that or you were very, very drunk at the time and thought you were installing it on some other poor bastard's computer as a prank.

I don't have to answer that.
Now I'm using Microsoft Security Essentials, which I adore. Not a RAM hog, it's free, and yes, a decent piece of MS software for free that doesn't popup every three seconds for no reason? Win.

I can't say I've ever used it beyond that malicious software removal tool. The only problem I have with MS security stuff is that it's practically default. Default stuff is usually the first to be circumvented.

No no, the MSE is different. It's basically a full security suite. Well okay no firewall but who cares? You use a router anyway.

Don't think so. It was, IIRC, an ITV show. Rogue Traders is BBC (and now a part of Watchdog?). The series I'm on about only had around 4 episodes per run. When I get the chance, I'll have to dig through my DVDs to find it.

If you're looking to repair or diagnose problems yourself you might want to check out Ultimate Boot CD for Windows, a powerful boot disc that can do everything from simply testing RAM (via the integrated Memtest86) to rolling back the registry--very useful if Windows is so broken that you can't get into Safe Mode or Repair Mode to launch System Restore. It also gives you a real Windows GUI--not just a command line or menu--and includes dozens of useful tools for virus removal and backup and anything else you might need.
Building UBCD4Win requires a Windows XP disc (either Home or Professional, but 32-bit only). If you have the real retail/OEM media you can use that directly, but for restore discs from Dell etc. some manual intervention is required. Once you have the OS source sorted out though it's as simple as clicking a couple of buttons and waiting until it prompts you to insert a writeable disc.
You can also put it on a flash drive if you prefer, which loads and runs much faster. The downside is that it requires USB booting support on the motherboard, but you can use a "kicker" CD to get around this.

Yikes, that sounds like way too many bugs to deal with.

No official Windows Vista support, let alone Windows 7. I won't even bother with a tool for that old an OS anymore. And truth be told, I can diagnose a PC more easily by just analyzing the Windows dump files. Between that and the great repair functions of Vista/Win 7 I only need my Ubuntu bootable flash drive so I can mount the drive and copy the minidump/dump files.
LE: Also, I don't think I ever saw a computer repair tech that isn't managing corporate system even go through the system logs, let alone analyze a crash/BSOD dump.

Sorry, I should have specified that this is most useful for XP-based systems The antivirus and memory tests and such will work just fine regardless, of course.
UBCD4Win is far less useful beyond XP because from Vista onwards you can boot to the repair menu, which usually works even if Safe Mode doesn't; if even that's not working you can boot into it externally from any install or rescue disc. Windows 7 includes a feature for burning a rescue disc if you don't have the install disc or would like a separate rescue disc (for Vista you will need to a patch to enable this feature or just download an existing ISO). The repair discs aren't tied to any particular computer beyond the architecture used so even if your system died before you made a disc you can easily make one with another system.
Together with the vastly improved self-repair functionality for startup problems it's possible to bring Vista+ back to working order from situations that on XP would be unrecoverable without special knowledge or third-party tools (which is how UBCD4Win came about to begin with).
There are some Vista/7-specific repair discs available at sites such as WinBuilder but none are at the polished state of UBCD4Win and all require some degree of user intervention in order to get it to build the disc successfully, so I'd stick to the official repair mode over this except as a last resort.

Well if the Russian Mafia manages to break into my laptop running MSE using an exploit even Microsoft doesn't know about and manages to steal my personal data to sell to Nigerians then I'll let you know. :P