White screen of death with flashing question mark

After a year and a half of frequent freezing of the screen, my expensive apple mac book has crashed. I thought this only happened to microsoft.
I tried reloading the software, just like the manuel suggested, and this failed.
Should I go buy a decent laptop from Dell or HP?

that usually means that the comp cant find a startup disc.. have you tried to boot from the install cd? put the disc in start up holding "c"..(it takes a while to boot from the disc).
how come you have had 18months of problems?

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