I have been in computer purgatory for the last three weeks. Sure I had my laptop, but my desktop's motherboard died. Purely by coincidence, the computer broke on the exact day I got a beautiful new 17-inch flat panel monitor. My goal was (and is) to run dual monitors with it and my old 15-inch flat panel. I'll post a picture when I get that part working.
It took a week for the repair shop guy to tell me that the motherboard had failed thanks to a bad batch of capacitors. Now it's hanging on my wall. I took the crash as a Message From God to upgrade, so I bought a new, higher performance motherboard and processor. Not surprisingly, the lobodomized computer didn't work when I started it up for the first time, so I spent another week trying to figure out how to save my data. I had a backup, but it was a few months old. Installing the hard drive as a secondary disk on one of Dad's computers didn't work (thanks, I think, to the dual-boot partition I had set up). Eric had the grand idea to use a Knoppix disk to recover my data. I loaded it up, and it mounted all the hard drive partitions and recognized my burner perfectly. I burned off three DVDs worth of files easier than I could have ever expected.
I wish my Windows reinstall had gone that easily. The video card kept crashing the system five minutes after bootup, preventing me from completing the setup. I ended up having to install Windows, wait for the crash, reboot, quickly install the video driver, and do a repair install with a new setup. The computer has worked beautifully since then, and I've spent the last few days reinstalling programs. It's nice to have a clean, fast computer with a new monitor and all my data still intact.