Pictures are now online of Sarah's laptop autopsy. I'd love to say that it was a success, but unfortunately it was completely out of my hands. The extent of the damage to the main board and the video screen would have likely cost as much as a new laptop. Look at the pictures for an idea of what happened. On the plus side, I did manage to take the hard drive from the old machine and place it in an old laptop (Rimmer, the IBM Thnkpad iSeries laptop), and fired it up. And unlike a certain nameless consumer operating system, it started up and pretty much figured out it was on a new system without much complaint. The second time it was restarted, it asked about some missing and new hardware, and then proceeded to just work. Now, granted, I had to edit one file to get higher resolution on the screen, but that entailed adding 1024x768 to the mode list. The sound unfortunately still doesn't work, but I've had trouble with the sound and later versions of Linux on that laptop for some time now. I don't think it's the fault of the OS, and remembered extreme gyrations to get it working under Redhat 7.3 before. Other than that, it just worked. None of this "STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF741B84C,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000) INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE", or "Hey, I'm in a new system, so I have to discover the chipset, the motherboard, the IDE controller... *cough sputter wheeeeeze I am still alive! die*" crap on this OS.