IBM THinkpad 600x data recovery

Oh but it is so satisfying resolving something succesfully.
I had a decrepit Ibm Thinkpad 600x that belonged to our farm's clinic
nurse. This machine was dead as a door nail and wished only to get the
data off for now, so I had to think "out side" the box.
So of course my first thought was usb to IDE adapter that one gets in
these 2.5" hard drives and so I "went back in time" to find a drive from
more or less that same era. Dismantled both - plugged it in and Windows
7 picked it up automatically (of course!) copy and paste and bobs your
disgustingly simple uncle!!
If only all tech support was that easy.
Now I have this blasted HP Omnibook6000 series notebook. I repaired this
aged thing a few months ago and then the user returned to say the screen
is only barely visible - well, I thought "Good riddens", since this
doing private jobs in work hours was freaking me out. Well who would
have thought the bloke had family that gave him a hand-me-down of the
exact same model. So I immersed myself into the dubious world of
excessively spare quantities of tiny notebook screws! To eventually swap
the screens of the 2 machines because as the villainous Mr Murphy would
have it the problem with the newly acquired family hand me down was a
motherboard issue - meaning the screen was fine! As if! Any hoo, swapped
the hard drives and screens and everybody was happy - but now same
thing, dim screen!! Dim sun!
Any hoo, I've put that on hold because our sister company (The
"neighboring" packhouse has delivered a pc needing repairs (not booting
up) and the IT manager for the entire group of companies has agreed to
allow me to charge them for this, which puts me at ease! Let the ticker
begin tocking!