Oh Great, The Laptop Is Taking A Vacation Too

I haven’t had the best of luck over the last couple of days with my laptop. No, I’m not talking about the internet connection up here in the mountains being slower then my Mom’s driving. First the battery apparently sort of exploded and is now pushing the compartment door open. My Dad said he’d heard of others having the same problem. Of course, my warranty expired a couple of months ago. Then yesterday I started having other problems. I knew high school schedules were coming out and I wanted to see what my son’s looked like so I logged in to the school’s parent site. I was able to log in and see the schedule. I was in the middle of something so I downloaded it and went about what I was doing. An hour later I sat down and turned on the computer so I could check out the schedule. The schedule had downloaded with the file ending with .pdf.part. Now .part is the Mac Preview file format. And .pdf is the file format for Adobe Acrobat. When I couldn’t open it, I tried renaming it so the file ended in .part. When that wouldn’t open I tried renaming it so the file ended in .pdf. That wouldn’t open either and that’s when I discovered that the laptop didn’t have Adobe Acrobat on it. I tried downloading Acrobat Reader, which is free and surely smaller then the Pro version that lets you convert PDF to word and search PDF files. With the painfully slow internet connection that I’m on it would have taken six hours to download the file, so I canceled that. By this time it looked like the file might be corrupted so I trashed it, figuring I’d download it again and things would be fine. Unfortunately, I couldn’t log back into the parent site. I haven’t been able to get back in since.
Today the battery meter started acting strangely. At first I figured the battery was running low because my son had had the laptop outside listening to iTunes and it hadn’t been plugged in. We plugged the ac adapter in and the battery meter didn’t rise, even after two hours of charging. I let it run out of time and the laptop was still running. I changed a setting on the battery meter and the meter then showed the battery to be full. I’m thinking that because the battery sort of exploded it just isn’t working right and that’s why the meter ran down to nothing. I’m going to have to get it fixed at some point, although I’m afraid of what it’s going to cost.
I know stuff happens, I’m not mad and I still love my laptop. If it wanted a vacation all it had to do was say so, LOL. I just wish this had happened a couple of months ago when the computer was still under warranty.