neverender

hi all, I own a laptop with a cracked LCD screen that will cost me (according to the manufacturer) ~80% of what I paid for the laptop. the manufacturer refused my request for the original MCE 2005 installation disks, and although I would gladly buy a normal installation disk from microsoft, I feel as if I already have. apparently, I cannot use the restore DVD on any other machine except this laptop (or probably more accurate, other laptops from the same company.) I've considered converting this laptop into a full fledged HTPC, but doing so would require me to replace hardware, which in turn would invalidate the DVD (at least I think it would...) so on that note, is there anything I can do to both make good use of what I have left of the laptop, or is there a way I could get around this problem. I've read a fairly decent amount of posts regarding slipstreaming sp2, or whatnot (mostly regarding nLite), but I haven't found anything of notable use. the restore CD seems to be of the drive image variety, and not an OEM installation. It does not boot as a typical MS installation CD would, by this I mean the blue screen pre-installion loading. I don't know how to go about extracting this data from the DVD, nor do I know if it is even a possibility. Can anyone help me out please?