re: Laptop troubleshooting -- battery issues, possible overheat

You should definitely do what ILikeLSUToo said in the post above mine.

I was half-jokingly thinking you should put the battery in the freezer... turns out some people claim to have had luck doing just that. Here's a brief Wikihow page on it:

LINK

I successfully revived a dead hard drive once this way for long enough to get some data off of it, but have never attempted to freeze a battery. Anyway, the gist is to freeze the battery a full 12 hours (make sure to use a ziplock bag and squeeze out extra air before sealing it to minimize moisture on/in the battery). Let the battery warm up to near room temp and keep it dry. Put it back in the laptop and charge it fully. Then let it drain to approx 3% to 5%. Repeat the charge / discharge cycle 3x total.

If it doesn't work, it's not the end of the world to have the battery in and still plugging the laptop in to a wall outlet to make it work.

Probably the next cheapest thing to check would be a new battery... I think you can find Dell batteries somewhere between $25 and $50... though it's possible it's not the problem.

One last note: if you haven't done so already, the first thing you should be doing right now is backing up everything on that laptop you want to keep in case things go from bad to worse.