My computer has not been well for sometime and I think it might have hit the big one today. Last night my wireless connectivity was spotty and every few minutes it would drop out and then return for a short period of time. More worrisome, however, was that I kept getting alerts that it was not registering my AC power adapter and vascillated between running on battery vs. power. The adapter was working fine. I even moved it to two different outlets to check. It must be something with the laptop itself. When I went to open it this morning, I got a message saying that the battery was low and then it immediately shut off. A few more attempts to power up also resulted in failure.

Has anyone had this problem before? I have a Dell Inspiron 600m. It's about 3 years old. I had no prior problems with it until maybe 8 months ago when it began to overheat quickly and run slow. I thought it was a memory issue and was looking to buy some more of it, but I think it's safe to say my laptops sickness goes beyond that.

I'm fairly confident that all my writing is safe and sound on the harddrive, but I still feel a slight amount of panic because I a) can't access it at the moment, and b) haven't backed up my computer since June. I have a lot of new fic material on there that I would hate to lose.

Can anyone help? *bites nails*