A couple of weeks I took my laptop to a local computer repair outlet to have the power socket replaced. I'd been considering doing it myself but after two years sitting on it I decided I'd give someone else the hassle. The outlet I took it to was expensive but their pledge was to fix any problem for a fixed fee of £150 regardless. To cut a long story short after replacing a huge number of components including the screen they admitted defeat and gave up on it.
I've been playing around with it this morning and found a multitude of problems including the inverter/back light continuously shutting down and blue-screen reboots under battery power. The last thing I saw before it finally died was a catastrophic operating system failure. I was about to bin it but there was something nagging in the back of my mind. Instead I booted it up with the manufacturer's restore disk which completely reinstalled the laptop to it's factory state. Job done, problem solved or so I thought. A few hours later all the problems started to reappear and here's why.
The laptop in its factory state automatically polls for a wireless network and logs into it if it's unsecured. MS Update then automatically applies updates and it's these updates that are literally destroying the installation and causing pseudo hardware failures ::)
Try it with a Linux distro e.g Ubuntu. You should be able to boot it and run from a Live CD. If it works then you can install to the hd.