My second Lenovo g555 screen died last week. Its a bit ironic - having bought two of the same laptops (they were cheap) in an attempt to keep at least one of them up-and-running no matter what.
My strategy worked on one point of failure. The LCD on one of the machines died, so I quickly swapped out the hard drive and was up and running in about five minutes.
The ironic part is that the LCD died on the second machine, too!
So I had to buy a new machine, and I didn't have any money to buy one. Thankfully I found an open box special at my local MicroCenter; an Acer 5742-6682 for about $300. At this point, I could simply swap out the hard drives, but I also wanted dual boot. So I figured a new install was in order. Should I got with Ubuntu again? Probably not, I don't like the new Gnome 3 shell and Ubuntu Unity thing they've got going on. So I tok a look at Mint Linix, a GNU/Linux system based off of Ubuntu (and of course Debian - the universal operating system) that focuses on simplicity.
I tried out Mint Linux, and I'm so glad I did. Installing a dual boot system with a restored Windows 7 Home Edition couldn't have been easier, and the user interface of Mint is absolutely phenomenal.
In short, Mint Linux 13 (Cappuccino) runs amazingly well on an Acer 5742-6682. If you haven't tried Mint, I don't know what to tell you. I'm just soooo glad I'm using it!