Had to do an HP/Compaq recovery - what will I have lost?

Okay, so my PC just up and died on me. I CAD'd it and noted that CPU usage was at 100% (odd considering this is a bumming marvelous PC, and quite new). I did a full system recovery/reboot, and was expecting to lose info. All the defaults have changed, my user account has been deleted, wallpaper and layout is different, programmes that were installed with the PC when I bought it (and uninstalled by me later, such as replacing Norton with Avast) are somehow back on it, even though I deleted them from the hard drive. This is extremely confusing to me.

I'm delighted to notice I havn't lost any work (I'm in Uni and all my notes are on here, as are my own pieces of 'work' - i'm a songwriter and photographer) but some stuff is deffinately different - I just wish I could put my finger on it!

What is likely to have changed? How can I prevent this from happening again?

Please help a girl who just nearly had a coronery when her entire world (computer) decided to flirt with death!

Had to do an HP/Compaq recovery - what will I have lost?ducati

It sounds like you did a system restore, not a recovery. A recovery on an HP involves first creating recovery media, such as CDs or DVDs, then restoring the PC from that media. When you do a recovery from that type of media, you lose everything that was on the drive - programs you installed, files you created, etc.