I have experienced a real computer crash. My child had my wife's laptop on her lap. The machine was on top of a laptop pad and a pillow. My wife would not let her use the machine like that because she thought the kid was careless in the way she handled it on her lap. I did not know that policy and allowed my child to use it on her lap like that.
One really loud crash later, I had to salvage the old Toshiba laptop. It was good that I had a desktop that I could connect the laptop's hard drive to. I used it to retrieve my wife's stuff. The machine would not boot up because it hit the ground when it was running. The impact probably put a bad sector on a spot of the hard drive that kept it from booting up.
I resolved the bad sector with a reformat of the drive, but the video will not work. I took it apart with help from the good folks on the internet. I hoped it was just a connector that came loose, but it is not. Using a bright flashlight, I could see that the screen still worked. It was just the back light that died.
The machine is too old to want to try and fix. I hooked it to the TV and now have a home theater PC. I was going to upgrade it anyway, but I have to punish my kid for what she did. While I hooked it up to the TV, the kid said, "It wasn't my fault it broke." After hearing that, I have to do something.
When I was a child, I dropped a jar of jelly and my old man thrashed my behind and unloaded some loud heavy duty swear words while I cleaned it up. My child drops a laptop computer and I just said, "That's all right. We were going to upgrade anyway." After hearing her say that it was not her fault, I have concluded that I am not that great at being a parent.