Gertrude the Wombat,
By the same token, a non-technically inclined person could spend weeks or months stabbing away at a problem.... hacking away at the registry, installing and uninstalling various bits of "repair" software they found on the internet, perusing through logs etc.....
All of which is, in 80% of cases likely to lead nowhere in solving the problem if you don't know what you're looking at in the first place. In which case you'll find yourself months down the line reformatting the thing anyway.
Hard drives are also dirt cheap these days.... so there's nothing stopping you installing fresh on a new one and mounting the old one internally/externally so you can still pull the stuff you forgot off it.
Finally, as I've already said above, when you're dealing with a potentially virus infected system, pulling executables over from the old on to the new is a bad move !