Apropos of nothing, I'm not sure it's a good or bad sign that when my post-warranty, unbacked-up Thinkpad T41 (nice machine) flat croaked with only 48 hours of flakiniess, I had no serious thoughts of going ballistic on Lenovo, nee IBM.
I said a prayer for the harddrive's survival. I got out the tools, and extracted said harddrive. I put the harddrive in a $50 IDE to USB enclosure, picked up at a nearby Best Buy, and plugged the dang thing into my desktop. Didn't lose a bit of data.
The Thinkpad HW? The LCD, Centrino Chip, 768 MB SDRAM, Keyboard, Trackpad, Wi-Fi Chip, XGA adapter, CD-RW, 100 MB Etherenet chip, et. al.? Ain't nothin but dirt to me baby. I figure it'll make a nice doorstop, or gag machine. Oh my god, I dropped my laptop just before the presentation.
And there might be a little value in the DRAM, but other than that...
Here endeth the catharsis.