What's wrong with the laptop?
Do you need a repair or just information recovery?
Loads of quick free ways to do this yourself,
Let me know the details I might be able to save you splashing the cash.
If it's dead you might not be able to recover anything from it.
On the other hand if it's just a matter of the OS not booting you can use something like this:http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%...%20Started.htm to recover data and then reinstall the OS.