There's nothing quite like having a laptop go belly-up for causing sheer panic. It didn't die, exactly, the Windows Installer file was deemed corrupted needing a Recovery return to factory settings. Cue a mad session of archiving to an almost full free-standing hard drive.
Recovery itself was fairly painless, as was reinstalling the files. It was the sheer hassle of re-installing the software
Same thing happened to me last year. Got everything back except my calendar/diary, which was on Windows and as far as I know cannot be backed up. Now I use the Google Calendar. It's not as good but at least it can't be lost.