It's never any fun to lose a computer, especially one that you may have never backed up resulting in a loss of data. If you still have the old laptip and the hard drive wasn't what died you can still recover your data from it. Take it out, hook it up as a slave drive to the new laptop and grab the files you want. Best of luck, mate.

Sorry to hear about the predicament.

erf, my mom has a set up that burns a hard drive to a few CD's worth of stuff, or so was the plan. Thanks for the advice though, that sounds a good deal easier then having to burn CD's. And i got a new laptop in the end, so i guess stuff worked out, mostly.