Laptop fried, is there any hope?

Hey folks, I have a story to tell, I don't know exactly where it should go. But anyway, here goes.

I've had a Dell Latitude D600 for about a year now, but its been in my car for a few months, up until a week ago. I just couldn't do anything with it because I was so busy, and didn't have anywhere to go that I could connect to Wi-Fi. So I finally got it out of my car and started tinkering with it (reinstalling MicroXP and Ubuntu 9.04). I messed around with it for a whole week and didn't have any problems. Tonight, while I was watching the Alabama/VA Tech game (go bama) at my brother's house, I was on my laptop, and the battery was getting low. I didn't want to plug in my power brick to charge it up, because the plug was behind the couch, and my sister in law's cord was already plugged in, so I figured I'd just use it (hers is a newer latitude, I thought they used the same power brick). Anyway, it charged up my laptop, and everything was fine, until I started doing an update for Ubuntu. it started lagging like crazy, and the screen would gray out, and come back to the normal orange color... That's when I noticed that the battery light on the keyboard was flashing red. I also realized that the fan wasn't running.. so I immediately unplugged it, turned it off, and took the battery off, which was scorching hot. I let it cool down, and turned my laptop back on, and tried starting Ubuntu, and I kept getting an error. I can load XP fine, but I couldn't figure out what the error meant in Ubuntu. Finally I realized that in the start up menu, it had 4 Ubuntu Options (two had the number 15, and the other two had 11, and one of each of those were recovery mode).. I tried the "ubuntu blah blah 11", and it worked fine. but the 15 (whatever that means), is corrupted or something...

So here are my questions.
1) what would cause my battery to become THAT hot?
2) why wasn't my fan working?
3) why do I have 2 different "ubuntus" loaded on my laptop (I only installed once)
4) I want a new laptop anyway, but because of this awesome economic crisis that we're all in, should I just try to fix my current one until a better time?
5) Since I was updating packages for Ubuntu, and it was freezing up while the battery light was flashing, could I have screwed up my hard drive?

 

1) Laptop's probably trying to charge the battery too fast. The current adapter line should be compatible with the D600, but if it's something like a 130W brick the D600 might try doing strange things? Hard to tell with this one.

2) Processor wasn't running that hot? There isn't a thermal sensor connected with the battery, so even if the battery is overheating, the laptop isn't going to care.

3) Don't know. Software issue.

4) Does everything still work? See if you can run the machine off mains power, battery power, and see if charges the battery. If it's good on all three, it's probably still fine.

5) You could screw up your software setup, but there shouldn't be anything wrong with the HDD itself. You should be concerned about your motherboard and battery, though.

 

3) You have two kernel packages installed, and that is normal. If you do a software upgrade that includes a change to the kernel, the old kernel is not removed, because if you have problems with the new kernel you can reboot back into the old kernel.

If you have a proprietary GPU and were using a restricted driver, then upgrading the kernel usually requires the restricted driver to be upgraded separately.