Inspiron 100 - relinquished the spirit...?

Oh, dear... I am coming to grips with the fact that my Inspiron 1000 (apparently geekspeak for "cheap bastard") laptop has given up the ghost.

It's spontaneously powered down on me once or twice, and I fear that today's was the last gasp. I gots no lights, not even a twinkle, not even on the AC power light. Oh, I am afraid this one's not coming back.

I've been watching the pile of silicon and dog shit degrade for a while. It hasn't done much that indicated a real meltdown, just gotten apparently slower, and the CD/DVD drive hasn't been right in over a year. The hard drive crashed a while back, and that was enough of an ordeal, and now this. Poop.

When the hard drive failed, I learned a few things:

• Dell didn't give me the OS CD's that should have come with it - they waited for me to find out on my own in my darkest computing hour. Shit, they could have e-mailed me at any time, confirmed my address, and shipped them. That would've been the thing to do for a company that valued its customers.
• Dell's Inspiron laptops aren't all that sturdy
• A helpful guy named Rick (working at Dell? I think so, but cannot now remember; nor can I read the e-mail dfrom that time which is on the hard drive of my laptop) read my blogged wail and did contact me, effectively talking me off the ledge. I'd like to buy him some beer.

I don't know that other manufacturers are any better, but I'm certainly going to give them a look, going forward. After all this fun, I'm certainly not happy enough to beeline my dumb, lemming ass back to Dell without comparison shopping.

I would like to be able to recover the data. I know better than to not make frequent backups. Once again, my laziness has caught up with me. Ah, well... C'est la vie.