My laptop has been acting really weird: very hard start ups, erratic behavior, inexplicably disconnecting from the network when everything else on the network works fine, needing to restart SEVERAL times a day, etc., etc.

Disk checker software stuff says very few "bad sectors" but another disk checker thing says I have several disk errors in the last hour. WTF? No Norton virus alerts ever. No Malwarebytes alerts ever. No porn (had to cut that off right away).

I give you computer guys A LOT of credit for dealing with this shit all day long. I can just imagine the asshats at some office freaking on your ass!

To be safe, I bought an external HD and have backed up my personal docs: everything in "My Documents", the entire "iTunes" folder and all of my photos.

I was hoping to make a "disk image" so I could restore all of the programs that I downloaded, some of which I paid for. Windows 7 won't let me make a disk image - it has failed repeatedly and I have spent many hours trying to figure out why. I have Googled the error codes that I get and done all of the fixes that I can find. No joy, just continued frustration and wasted time. I've been messing with this for 3 days now.

Therefore, I am ready to say FUCK IT! and reformat my machine to factory settings and begin again. I don't give a shit if it takes 2 days for all of the updates and shit to download.

Any advice from you sages of the ether-world?

(excuse any "incorrect" terminology)