Ouch - sorry to hear it.
My advice: Go out and buy a new computer - desktop or laptop, whatever. You can get a good low-end computer for a few hundred - or buy a refurbished one, as you mentioned. Get your roommate to give you some $$$ toward it.
Then, borrow someone's monitor and plug it into your old laptop (so you can see what you're doing), network the two machines together, go to the old laptop and set your hard drive to "shared", and copy everything to the new machine. Scavenge the old machine for parts (ethernet card, mouse, RAM, etc) then toss it.