I used to have two of them around....Until one fateful day that I had my aem out in the engine bay testing things and sorta blanked that the lap top was resting on the mechanical fan and kinda bumped the key....Threw the laptop across the engine bay and tore one of my cables into bits.

Regardless of the state of the laptop, as long as the HDD is in good shape, you will be able to remove it, and with an adapter, pull all of your stuff of it to your new computer.

On the USB-Serial converters, I thought I read somewhere that the best one to use is the Dynex branded one. It might be just to use that driver since they should be all pretty much universal. Serial port laptops are getting harder and harder to find, it will be something older.

Yes, I've been using a couple different usb-serial adapters but with my newer work laptop they only seems to work intermittantly. I'd rather just get one with a serial port and not deal with the adapters.

My personal laptop may be repairable, I'll probably look into it since I think I have some stuff on there that I'd like to get off. Right now when you turn it on the internal fan runs and thats it. It doesn't attempt to boot up, just blank screen and no hdd activity.

And what happened with your laptop? It may be fixable?