Yes, the power cord has the green light lit. When I called Gateway, they had me take out the battery, press the power button for 30 sec, then start the computer without the battery in in. It started fine, then died. I tried it again, same thing. He said it may be the internal power supply. I went out for several hours, came back, put the battery back in the computer, plugged in the adaptor cord, and all is working fine. I'm afraid to move this thing in fear the charging light won't come on again. (I'm using the same outlet I tried early when it wouldn't work). They told me it would be 10 days to get it back from repair. I just backed up my important files as this is my work computer. I'm going to observe it to see if the charging light continues to stay on...I really don't want to send this in for repair unless I HAVE TO.

In numerous cases, Dell in particular, if you flip over the laptop there is a pushbutton on the battery and a series of LEDs that light up to indicate the level of charge when you push the button (assumes the charge circuit is operational and that the battery can hold a charge). I would start by checking Dell's website to see if the battery is part of any recall, many were. If you rarely use it on battery I wouldn't spend any extra on a larger capacity one. Third party ones should be used with caution, quality is often lacking. Personally I have used Lenmar replacements, for laptops and camcorders, when competitively priced. So far I have been lucky, some reviewers seem to diss them. I would definitely factor in the cost of a new battery vs purchase of a new warrantied unit also.

This is from Microsoft. You can try to do some of this. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fix-network-adapter-problems#1TC=windows-8 If not, then maybe take it in to whomever does your computer repairs. I believe it's a part that can be changed. Here's another wiki that might be helpful: http://www.wikihow.com/Reinstall-Wireless-Drivers

To all you kind people: Update Some things I have managed to do so far: Made a recovery flash drive / Installed Classic shell, which has been a big help / installed my husband's Bible Works software and FireFox, our preferred browser. Today in my spare time I am working on getting and installing Open Office, having no need for and no desire to pay for Office 365, which we could have had a free trial of for one year. I don't want to start down the path of subscribing to the Office software, when all we need is a word processor, so am hoping things will go well. It seems that to download O.O. to the laptop was going to take "1 hour and 1 minute," so now I am about to see if I can download it to a flash drive on my PC and use that to do the installing. (Update on that: It worked fine. Downloaded in a flash and was easy to install, though I did have to override the laptop's warning that it wasn't from the App store, so might be dangerous.) Oh, and I have ordered an external DVD/CD optical drive so as to be able to install the OED, as my husband uses that a lot, too. Things are looking up, but he has not yet begun to try to use the laptop.