I dunno man, I'm no expert but if you had a gun to my head I would say the problem with your computer is that it's FIVE years old and after 6 months, computers don't really seem capable of handling the new fandangled technological advances.
Does it have a floppy disk drive?
More seriously, it sounds like your RAM. Power supply problems tend not to supply power at all. But the fact that you have a laptop and can't figure out a way to test if it's a power supply problem makes me wonder whether you're using your socks as your naughty mittens.
But you're being a moron. Fixing a 5 year old computer when they're literally giving new computers away to anyone with a few hundred bucks? What's going on with you.