Hopefully you will be able get out of the jury duty, I agree, it would suck and they don't compensate the time well at all.
As far as the comp goes, when you bring it to the shop, we can run a couple utilities I have on it that are on a bootable disk to verify the hard drive and ram etc. Since all this happened as a result of slamming the lid too hard, I am guessing some type of hardware damage is the cause. I also have the adapter to put the hard drive in the regular machine and ghost it to another drive if we need to. We shall see.
As far as the rash, no more info please!
