A good Christmas present is a 2 GB flash drive with a version of Ubuntu on it. Works on anything USB-bootable and is very easy for non-Linux people to understand.
Clonezilla is very nice to have too - it makes backing up trivial and reliable.
As others have said, make the dud disk a scratch disk after a new one has been installed and configured. On Windoze, a ground-up rebuild might actually be desirable.
SO