As Jerry mentioned, check the battery. I had a failure similar to yours except the battery wasn't the problem. It was the motherboard. I bought a replacement from eBay, a "custom used" computer with an SSD hard drive and eight gigs of ram for the whopping price of $150. Came with Win7 preinstalled. So before you head out to Best Buy or order on Dell, check out the used computers on eBay. You'll save a bundle.