Acer Aspire 4730 Recovery Problem

Hi, My daughter has a new Acer Aspire 4730 laptop using windows vista and things were a bit buggy on it. It took forever to load to desktop and once there you could not load and programs. I tried to do a system recovery by using alt+10 at the Acer screen and the recovery program starts but gets to like 16 percent and starts over. I think there might be a problem with the hard drive. Long story short my wife bought this laptop behind my back and against my advice to get my daughter another laptop seeing as she had just destroyed here last 3 computers and MY Sony Viao. I was using a friend's 10 inch netbook which was quite painful for 3 months when I found that they had this Laptop hidden in my daughter's room all this time. Then after I discovered it they would not let me use it. now that I have bought another Core 2 Quad @ 2.5ghz , 4 gigs ram, Windows Vista Ultimate, HP w2207 monitor, Creative wifi xtreme sound card, creative T-20 speaker, upgraded to a BFG 650w PSU and install a Nvidia 9600 GSO 768mb GPU they think they have the right to use my computer. No I say.

My wife claims she bought an extended warranty and the "Geek Squad" at Bestbuy told her it would be 3 days to fix it but that was 5 days ago and she has yet to take it in. If they had talked to me about it or gotten me involved I would have told them to make a recovery disk but seeing as it won't restore from the embedded utility the problem might be more than just the partition. Any advice on what might be the problem?

I dragged an old IMB 1 ghz PC out of retirement they can use. Windows 2000, 256mbs ram, onboard video graphics The 10 inch netbook I borrowed was twice as powerful.

At first it would go to desktop but nothing else. I tried it safe mode with no luck. Then I tried to restore from alt+10 and it starts the restoration but only get to 16% and ii get a napp6.exe error. If I try to book from HD or disk all I get is a black screen with a flashing cursor at the top left hand corner. At first I was thinking the memory was the problem or the HD but knowing kids and there download practices a virus can't be ruled out.