Laptop terminally ill???

My wife has a Gateway laptop (366 MHz, about 3 years old). She tripped over a USB cord and the laptop fell off a shelf about 3 ft. above a hardwood floor (the computer was running at the time). There are visible cracks in the case/lid that houses the LCD screen at both hinge points that run a couple of inches out into the lid. When you try to boot the computer, it powers-on and you briefly see the hard-drive icon appear on the little black & white LCD screen that shows what's going on - the hard drive spins but the computer doesn't boot and the display remains totally black.

A friend has recoverd my data from the hard drive and suggested trying to boot from a floppy with the hard drive removed, but it will not boot from the floppy. I also hooked up the external monitor output to see if I got a live display, but it stays totally blank.

I understand that laptop repairs are very expensive, so the point of all this is: Would you even risk a diagnostic charge (have no idea, but guess it would be $75 minimum?) to find out if it is repairable? If the repair bills were getting closer to $1000 than $500, I probably would just rather buy a new laptop with much faster processor, bigger HD, CD burner, etc.

What's the probablility this thing is pretty much a doorstop? What would you do?

Thanks,
John

in reality, you should not spend one dime to fix the lapper. that money could be well used to buy another as you suggested.
i found a special on ebay, pentium 4, 2.0 gigz speed, 256 ddr ram, 20 gig drive, 15 inch screen, 4 usb ports, firewire port, infrared port, blah blah, for 899.00. wow! its a dandy.
wife loves it.
however, i fix laptops free of labor charge, and only parts cost. in this case tho, a gateway parts machine on ebay, to strip, may be impossible to find.
soooooo,

I would not spend any significant amount of money to fix the laptop. However, if you have some data you would like to recover from the hard drive, the easy way to try this would be to remove the drive from the laptop and connect as a second drive to a working desktop PC. You will need an adapter for the IDE cable to do this, but those are about $12-$15. If the hard drive data can be recovered using this method, it will be a lot cheaper that using a data recovery service.

See this post for info on adapters:

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...hreadid=126459

the man said his friend already recovered the data from the laptop hdd.
duh

A quick check to see if only the LCD screen is busted would be to connect an external monitor in the back to see if it still works. Usually if you plug it in and boot up it displays straight away or you might have to press Fn + F5 to get a display on your screen.

Ummm.... I think I said that in the first post!

"I also hooked up the external monitor output to see if I got a live display, but it stays totally blank."

But thanks, anyway!

Sorry dont know how that one slipped by me....:o It could be the processor might have popped out, have you tried opening it and rechecking the cables/connections?