The path to limbo:

1 – buy a refurbished emachines laptop through an e-bay store.
2 – use said laptop happily for about 7 months.
3 – bring laptop to recommended repair shop because display is increasingly not actually displaying anything.
4 – receive call from friendly technician at said repair shop, who has very quickly diagnosed the problem (the video cable looks like it’s been chewed by deranged rats) and says it should take a couple of days to get the part, and a couple of minutes to fix the machine.
5 – get another call from same technician, albeit in a less friendly mood, who has discovered that the only place from which anyone can get the part is Future Shop. Oh, and Future Shop won’t order the part based on a phone call, because they need a physical person to sign the contract, even though there’s no actual repair contract, just a part order, which requires a signature….
6 – armed with part number read directly from video cable, go in person to Future Shop to sign said contract.
7 – try desperately not to kill the nice man at Future Shop when he informs you that there is no such part number, and implies rather overtly that since you thought it was a part number, you are obviously an idiot whose experience with computers is about as in-depth as is his with women.
8 – convince the Future Shop guy to let you at least open a file and sign a &*%#$ contract so you don’t have to come back in person once the whole part number thing has been sorted out.
9 – convince the technician from (4) to speak directly with the Future Shop guy from (7).
10 – two weeks later, find yourself still computerless, waiting for a part number that apparently does not, technically, exist, because although Future Shop is the sole distributor of emachines parts, Future Shop does not deal directly with emachines per se, and besides, emachines products purchased through Future Shop have different part numbers, and so far no one has been able to correctly interpret the camel entrails or something.
Argh.