Dell inspiron N5010 crashes after a few minutes or less

[lulukobe]

Hello computer techs!

I've had my beloved laptop for a while now, and last month a message started to pop up saying ' consider replacing your battery' 'your battery cannot hold full power'.

But as long as I put the adaptor when it was low, it was fine.

Then I took a plane, tried my laptop at my hotel and it won't stay on. It just crashes without warning- no messages, just all power off. Sometimes after 10 seconds, often after 1 minute. The longest has been 7 minutes.
I've taken the battery out and just run it from the power source (adapter) to see if anything would change. It didn't.

Could anybody help me?

I'm very worried this could be a hard drive issue which might mean I lose all of my photos and files.

I'm overseas for another couple of months so cannot take it to a Dell technician in Australia for a while.

Thank you for any suggestions or pointers.

 

[Titillating]

Is it possible that the voltage provided by the outlet at the hotel is too high/too low for what your laptop uses?

 

[lulukobe]

No that can't be it. I didn't have it plugged into power the first time I tried it. Just tried it again with power adapter connected and not connected and it seems to make no difference. When it crashes it also makes a click sound when everything turns off. I saw another thread that suggested it could be the cooling or the fan. I hope this is the problem as I have stupidly never successfully completed a backup.

If it's not the temperature/dust /fan problem could it be anything else?
Could it be a harddrive problem?

Just trying to know if I'm going to lose all my files or not