drivers corrupted or not installed

[mercury_chicago]

I have a Dell Inspiron 5160 that has, until two weeks ago, worked fine. It suddenly started to lose power and would not take charge from the adapter cord. I Purchased a cord and it stated to take a charge, but now after the system is on for more than 5 or 10 minutes, it pops and freezes. After having to manually shut the system down and rebooting several times, the screen shows blue and gives an error message that says that recently installed hardware or software may be the culprit, or that the drivers to either the mouse or printer or video card needs to be installed. I'm not very savvy on issues like that, nor have I install any hardware and am afraid that I'm at a loss when asked to remove a - this - or install a - that. The message also informed me to contact you guys, so here I am. Am I in the right forum to ask this type of question or am I rattling on about a subject that's best handled in some other venue. I'm suprised that it my screen hasn't shut down on me yet. Maybe it knows that I'm telling on it and is trying to act right for now.

[Ob1]

are you running windows xp?
can you boot into safe mode? after pressing the power button, press the F8 button repeatedly until a menu pops up. select safe mode and see if it boots up with the minimum services and devices. if it does then its probably a corrupt driver. if it doesnt boot up in safe mode then its probably either a hardware issue or a corrupt system file.

you can run a chkdsk from safe mode
start>run>cmd>type chkdsk /r

you can run a chkdsk from the recovery console by booting to the xp cd
select the version of windows, then login as the administrator then type chkdsk /p