I wonder if all Dell needed to do to fix those flaming batteries was to reformat the hard drives.

Sounds like you got a pretty good warranty, although this stuff is why I usually advocate storing any data on a different drive/partition than the OS/Applications. I’ve had Dell support refuse to do anything about a hardware issue my grandmothers PC had until they could try re-imaging the HDD. If all the data is separate, its a lot less painful.

Plus, it covers lightning damage and accidental damage. Can’t beat it.

That being said, this is one more reason why I prefer to do my own tech support. Replacing a keyboard on a laptop is usually pretty simple. Replacing an LCD panel (and/or the cable that connects it to the motherboard) is also usually not too difficult. You have to do some Googling to find a store that will sell the part, but that’s usually not too big a deal.

… And all that having been said, this is another thing I love about my Mac. Macs have a feature known as “firewire target disk mode”. You hold down “T” while powering-on the computer and it enters a mode where the whole thing becomes a FireWire hard drive. You can then use a simple FW cable to attach it to another computer, and access the drive to make a backup or perform other maintenance. So you can usually get your data out even when the system won’t boot, as long as the drive hasn’t actually died.