#computer repair

I've tried letting it charge overnight with the old cord, which might not work (it doesn't have any LED power lights to tell me). I've tried letting it charge overnight with a new cord that I know works, on a different port (a USB-C charger instead of the normal round-port charger; this is a cord I use on my work laptop). I've taken the back off, removed the battery, and tried powering it up with both cords with the battery out; I've inspected and re-seated the battery and tried again with both cords. Nothing.

The laptop has never had LED power indicator lights of any kind (no light-up keyboard, no LED indicator at the power port) so I can't tell if power is getting in but the hard drive is baked, or if the problem is that no power is getting to the battery, or if the problem is that no power is getting through the battery to the hard drive.

The problem is that I don't know what the next step is. Do people take computers to repair shops anymore? Is data recovery still a thing people can pay to have done? Asking HP to have a look at it is not ideal because I don't have any protection plan with them, but I can take a swing at it. I don't know if there's a way to hook up another laptop to the hard drive -- the drive isn't easily removable, and while I have other laptops I could try to connect to it, I don't have that kind of mechanical knowledge, at least not anymore.

I can afford another laptop; in fact when work upgraded my old laptop they let me buy it from them. And I have a somewhat recent backup of the busted one, but it's not complete -- it's missing about a month, and there were some old video files stored on it that aren't backed up anywhere. It will be insanely inconvenient if I have to just write it off, but it won't be tragic. I just would really like to at least pull the data off.