Looking for advice for a replacement ASUS system

I have an ASUS U50A notebook computer that has the dreaded white screen of death (WSOD). I had replaced the display (bought it on eBay), with the exact same model. When I first plugged it in, I got the WSOD, as I powered up my other computer (a new TF100), it began to work fine. The WSOD is now back and won't go away. I have tried reseating the video cable, but to no avail. I am now sick of dealing with, and since the computer is 5 years old, with a replacement motherboard itself in it, I don't care to continue to try and fix it. This is not the reason for this post, but if anyone has any ideas about fixing this that don't involve me throwing away more money on it, or yet again undoing the screws, I will accept them.

So even though I will discard this old computer, I still have a lot of the ecosystem of parts (e.g., battery, power supply, fan, etc.) that I would very much like to be able to use with a new ASUS computer that I will be buying. I also plan to scavenge the hard drive & RAM boards as they are easy to extract - and in the case of the hard drive, I would like to be able to extract some files that I had not properly backed up. (If there is some way for me to hookup this internal hard drive as an external drive of some kind, that would suffice.)

The question is what current ASUS computer that is generally available uses these same parts (the fan is not all that important since it is pretty cheap, but I figure that the battery & power supply probably still work with some ASUS system.) As for what I use this computer for, the only gaming I do is to use the VBox adapter to run my Xbox game on my system, and the U50A has done well. I also play music & video, and the general do the internet stuff. I used to be a computer programmer until I became obsolete, but I would like to able to fire up an IDE and code; again, the U50A seemed to do well. I also liked the way that I could to a hard boot by disconnecting the power supply & battery. However, with all that said, one thing that has bugged me about the U50A is that it could not seem to run an external hard drive through the USB ports, and would crash trying to supply the power (it would be OK if a USB hub was used, but that is a pain to use on the road.) I plan to run Windows 7 and could not care less about having a touch screen. I am open to all suggestions.