Don't think of it s spending money on that computer, think of spending money to recover the data from that computer.
If you want just the data and don't care about the laptop. Pull the HDD out of the laptop and hook it up to another computer using a SATA->USB adapter and copy the data off the HDD to the other computer. Put the HDD back in the laptop, do a clean install of the OS. Afterwards, do whatever you want with the laptop, sell it, keep it, give it away, etc...