Hooray for Alienware! (Don't buy these computers)

you can easily remove the hard drive and put it in another computer as a slave drive to access the data on it. If you have any friends that are somewhat computer savy they can do it. I bet for less then $100 you could take it to a repair shop and they can yank the drive and put the data you need on a dvd disc of you really need it.

Just because it will not turn on does not mean the data is gone. I would blame the power supply as the first culprit. They seem to go bad on most computers before any of the other hardware goes bad.

Good Luck.

I'm a writer, musician and photographer and I never store my work on the primary hard drive of any computer. I have secondary internal or external drives that I use to store my data.

That has saved my ass more times than I can tell you. I can reformat the OS drive at will without fear of losing data.

I also back up any new work to another hard drive on my home network as soon as I'm ready to quit for the day. I bought an inexpensive Acer tower for that purpose with a terabyte hard drive and I installed another terabyte drive internally and bought a USB 3.0 external to back the internal data drive up weekly.

My primary work laptop is an HP with Win7, so you can imagine why I'm so AR (my wife says OC) about backups. I also have an HP with Ubuntu Studio on it and a MacBook that I inherited when my daughter ?upgraded? to a MacBook Pro.

Hardware is another issue altogether. I've found that HP has been the most dependable and easiest to locate locally in sufficient varieties to fit my purposes. Others will have their own opinions. They may have had a different experience.

I've found I can do whatever I want to do multimedia-wise with any of these computers and OS'es if that helps you to figure out what to use to replace your Alienware laptop.