[Anonymouse]

I did lose a bit, but...oh well, lesson learned. Anyway the system nuking process is complete and my laptop's more or less back to the way it was...with several passwords changed, that is.

That Chrome feature to export/import passwords is very handy; I doubt I could've remembered them all. Same with bookmarks. But everything I'd installed was either backed up or could be downloaded again from source, so this was more of an inconvenience than a disaster.

I still don't think they did anything drastic, to be honest, and I ran four different malware tools which found nothing except a few tracking cookies. But even if they did put anything on the laptop, it's well and truly gone. Before the nuke it did occur to me to wonder if my laptop had been turned into a bot, but an online check via Kaspersky said its IP address wasn't part of any known botnet. Nor is it now.