Bad blocks on HDD

A couple of days ago, my laptop's HDD started to fail, I kept getting messages to back-up my stuff and so I did, just it case something bad really happened to it. After shutting it off and trying to get back on Windows 7, I couldn't get to the login screen after many tries and decided to leave it alone.

Fortunately, I had a live USB of Back Track 3, so I used that to scan the laptop's HDD using the "badblocks /dev/sda2" command on Konsole. After about a day of scanning, it finally finished and I got:

"Pass completed, 1600 bad blocks found."

I don't know much about hardware, so I'm hoping someone here knows what I should do next? Format it? Get another HDD? Anything else I can do? My highest priority is, of course, trying to see if there's a way to fix it, but if it's already dead, I'd have no problem with buying a new one.

Remember, I have my stuff backed-up, so deleting everything in it is no problem. Thank you for your time.

Bad blocks can be repaired, but in this case with 1600 bad blocks, even repairing it won't bring much life back to the drive. Your time is extremely limited with the drive regardless of what you do. I recommend you replace the hard drive.

Yeah, the high count of bad blocks was not a good sign, but I still decided to get an opinion from other people that would know more about this.

Anyways, thanks for the feedback, man.

You can run a hard drive health program to see what it is at and try some advice on this page: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/29