If the owner of the laptop gets an external hard drive and a copy of Ghost, as mentioned above, to copy the hard drive onto the remote drive, the faulty hard drive can be replaced and a clone of the current contents can be put in place to keep everything operating as usual. For desktop computers hard drives are cheap, but generally not so for laptops. The owner might want to do a little shopping to decide if it is worth replacing the hard drive or just buying a new laptop.

Meanwhile, why can't you use your computer on YOUR ISP? Is hers a DSL setup, and you're going through an always on connection? Your laptop should be equiped to search for an existing network. Does she use passwords to protect it? If it's dialup, simply find a local access number for your service and go for it.

SRS