Acer laptops (I believe all) comes loaded with a hidden recovery partition in the hard disk. To boot from this partition, simply press ALT+F10 (at least for the Aspire series) at the “boot up” screen where it says press F2 to enter settings.
So if the next time you go for a repair and all they are going to do is a “format”, “reinstall”, or “recovery”, then you can also do it yourself. Save that $80 (or whatever the amount).