Carbonite My Shining Knight
Hopefully Earl’s link will work for you. If it doesn’t invest in an USB external drive enclosure that matches your drives dimensions. Take the Drive out of the dead computer and hook it up to a computer that is functional. The other computer should recognize it and allow you to browse the directory structure and move any files that you want to make sure to have a copy of. You then have two options you can either Buy a new HD and reinstall Windows or you can reinstall on the old HD just keep in mind everything will be wiped out.
I also Highly recommend a service such as carbonite. It is important to continue to have backups locally as well but they do and will fail at the wrong time. The nice thing with Carbonite and other services like that, they have invested in the infrastructure to have multiple layers of redundancy so the likely hood of them loosing your data is very very slim.
Let us know if you need any more help. I know there are several of us IT guys out here.
