I attended a local community forum last night (on ways to reduce the death toll of the thousands of possums, wallabies, birds, pythons etc being killed on Wakehurst Parkway, if you have to know) and one blokes laptop died. The hard disk went "caput" and taking with it all his precious data, epecially the data he needed for this weekends deadline.
He knew me and my line of work and asked if I could help, in a few minutes the Ubuntu CD (6.0.6) had booted successfully into his machine and his most valuable data was stored safely onto his USB key and opened in OpenOffice. He may no longer have been able to boot into Windows XP but his machine was 100% functional and his data was saved.
Don't ask me why a copy of Ubuntu 6.0.6 was on me at a road kill forum but it made his day - so much so that he kept the CD and was so impressed that he's going to switch his desktop over.
Nice work by the Ubuntu team :)