Another way to check it once you get the new laptop... I bought a hard drive caddy on ebay I think it cost around $10 with shipping. It has a usb cable with it. I took the HD out of my old laptop and hooked it to the new one and was very thankfully able to retreive all of my old files. And now I use that drive as a backup and I can plug it into any computer and it pulls right up.

I mention this because the old one sounds like it could be more of a partition issue than the hard drive.

I will say this much for dell.... The dog knocked a glass of lemonade over on my latitude fried the keyboard...but it still worked. Then my DH2B's DD came to visit and she was using my computer to watch movies...apparently she fell asleep and knocked a glass of tea over on the table that my laptop sat in overnight... it took a while to dry but it kept right on chugging...until I dropped a glass and a few tiny drops of tea hit the keyboard and THAT was the final straw and the dead of my 5 yr old dell that I bought used to begin with. I will say that was one tough little machine!

Another word of caution...that tough little machine downloaded a virus while mcaffee was updating when i left it running overnight. Try not to leave it connected to the internet when you go to bed.