[maxtoralias]

My brother-in-law bought a PC from PC world and due to a hardware failure of a component on the motherboard (the network adapter died) this caused the machine boot problems.

He rang the PC world's advice line and was told to run the restore function (this is basically a packard bell PC using an NEC software restore function stored on a FAT32 partition of the hard drive).
However, the machine refused to boot into the restore partition and although he could log into windows using my XP Pro CD, there appeared to be a lot of file corruption and no means of effectively repairing it. The machine was using XP Home.
As a consequence of this boot failure, he was instructed to format the hard drive, thereby removing the entire drive contents and no means of restoring the software as Packard Bell did not supply software on CD and you are therefore totally reliant on the restore partition. Had my brother-in-law been a little more tech savvy, he could have used the DVD writer to back up his system, but as he is not, he is now totally reliant on the restore CD's being sent from Belgium.
This is before the hardware problem can be 'formally' diagnosed as having no means of loading windows, further diagnosis is extremely difficult.
However, it is also evident that without the warranty, people like my brother-in-law may be stuffed as they are totally reliant on the support that the vendor offers.