my laptop just died

It was not unexpected, seeing how it predates 2005, but still. Also, being the lazy moron I am, I was lackadaisical about backups despite this. Maybe I can salvage something from the hard disk still, though I have never done that with a laptop hard disk before, because this was my first laptop ever. Also this is my first data loss since 1998, so I guess I had a pretty good run wrt to disk and computer failures, which explains my abysmal backup habits.