Acer warranty due to expire - how much do repairs cost?

I've pretty much missed the boat for renewing my 1 year warranty, and so basically if my laptop stops working I'll have to fund the repairs myself.

Has anyone else asked Acer to repair their laptop when it was outside of the warranty, and how much did it cost? Obviously this is specific to the particular part that was broken, but I'm wondering if it's value for money, or just plain extortion!

The reason I'm so concerned is that my laptop occasionnally makes odd beeping noises, which I guess is coming from the hard-drive because it sounds like a scratch / screeching sort of beep. I made a thread on this topic:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=2930346#post2930346

It's never really given any problems before, but yesterday I was playing a game and the game froze for a couple of seconds during the "beep", then resumed. So my problem seems to be getting a little worse!

Any ideas on the problem or how much it might cost to repair?

 

It obviously depends on what breaks. A hard drive is $100-200 depending on what you get.

 

I believe a motherboard for an Aspire 5250 laptop (dual core, 2gb ram, 160gb hd) runs about $400 - not much less than a new laptop.