After leaving my laptop up for six hours, I come back and it looks like my screen brightness got set to an incredibly low value because I can barely make out the windows that I left on my screen, but for the most part, it looks like a black screen. I had not set it in hibernation mode; I had just left the screen there with all my windows open. And the computer is definitely on, because it's still playing music that I accidentally left playing on iTunes. I adjust the screen by pushing it forward, and suddenly the screen is back to normal ---- until the computer decides to randomly hibernate! I get it out of hibernation mode, and my brightness settings are still normal but the computer starts shutting down the minute I get it back up.
So I turn the laptop back on again, and it starts up like a laptop normally would. I start Firefox, but then I get an error message telling me that Firefox is "not compatible with the Windows disc", so I can't freaking use an Internet browser. The computer's on for a few minutes until the screen suddenly turns "almost-black" again. Almost-black as in the brightness settings are incredibly low but I can baaaarely see the window if I squint just enough. And then it does the whole random-hibernation and random-shutdown thing again. I've tried starting it up two more times, and I've gotten the same exact reaction. Not only that, the last time I did it, after Windows started up, the screen automatically went "black."
My computer has never had problems like this, so this whole thing was unexpected. Any help/advice at all would seriously be appreciated; thanks in advance!
p.s. I have a Windows XP on a Medion Akoya LS.