It took until Christmas to get the data off the hard drive of my deceased laptop, and until today to convince Hewlett-Packard that they do have to fix it, since I bought it a year ago today and it is therefore (just barely) covered by the original warranty. Thank you, nephew James, for interfacing the hard drive to a desktop for data retrieval. No thank you, HP, for trying to backdate the purchase date by two months so you wouldn’t have to pay for the repairs, sending FedEx to my work address when I was waiting for them at home, and not sending me the promised transcripts of my ‘chat with an HP technician online’ sessions.
More soon.