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Check eBay for the laptop's screen. You may be surprised, depending on how much your original computer cost. My Dell 1600 x 1200 laptop screen goes for $150.

If you are looking to transfer the contents of your hard drive to a new laptop, there are several ways. However, the most straight-forward way is to set up your programs on the new computer, put the internal hard drive of your broken laptop into an external USB drive assembly (with USB 2.0 cable, about $20 from NewEgg.com), and copy off the data as you need it. There are a few programs that will help selectively move things for you, but none are foolproof. As long as you keep your broken laptop's drive as an external drive, you can always put it back in your old system and have everything be okay if you get it fixed.

In the meantime, you can continue to use your old computer without repairing it with any external VGA monitor. Practically, you could continue for a long time that way, if the portability wasn't needed.