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 🙁