its not all that easy to erase all the data. if youre going to "a big city" swing by best buy and get a 2.5 inch
IDE external HDD case. it'll cost you about $45 bucks at best buy, but if it doesnt work, you can take it back.
basically, all you have to do is take the HDD out of your busted laptop, take off the mounts used to secure it to the computer, and put the HDD in the case. if you plan ahead, you could do it in the best buy parking lot and test it on one of their showcase computers

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Laptop: HP DV9000z
CPU: AMD Turion64x2 2.0 Ghz
GPU: nVidia GeForce go7600
RAM: 2048Mb, HDD: 2.5" 120Gb,
OS: Windows Vista
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