You need to check your event viewer. If you don't know how to get in there do: Control Panel - Performance and Maintanance - Administrator Tools - Event Viewer - System.
And see if any red X's show or yellow caution signs. Do not worry about the DCOM red X, it's not important. If you see any other ones, scroll across the screen and write down the codes etc., which it shows and do a search for problems. Sounds like something is going bad in the computer and if its system related, the above will show it.

These are the errors and yield signs that popped up when I followed your instructions.

RED- Source: Windows Update Agent Category: Software Event:16

RED- Source: acpi Event:4
RED- Source: acpi Event:5

Yellow- Source: Tcpip Event: 4226
Yellow- Source: Plug Play Manager Event: 256

Red- Source: Service Control Manager Event: 7011

Thank you for all of your help. I don't know what this stuff means. Any help is greatly appreciated.

You might want to go back to those errors in 'Event Viewer' by using the 'Computer Management' tool in control panels 'Administrative Tools'.

If you double click those errors a window pops up with a link to microsoft support files for a possible fix or explanation of the problem. Follow those links. Not all will have the fix but oftentimes they will.

While in that computer management window also look in the 'Device Manager' for errors. Show up as Yellow exclamations or Red X's.

Well those are a lot of errors. You can do what mikie says or just enter each error above into google and solutions come up via that route as well. It looks like there are multiple problems.

You should also try looking thru the Dell forums which is at the link below, just click on an item in the drop down list and look for or ask about your problem The api things looks like BIOS errors, so that's a start.

http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/?category.id=inspir

I don't know how you feel about reinstalling your operating system and reloading everything from scratch, but that may be a solution if nothing else works. But first try following the instructions for fixing each problem that you can and see what happens.

If you have photos, music, documents or any other non recoverable items, you may want to back them up onto CD's, DVD's or an external hard drive before doing anything. Better to have all your things off the hard drive before attempting this stuff if your computer is starting to not load properly.

When you get to the main forum, look in left column, click on Tech Talk, then next screen, left column, click on Portable, then the list of all items comes up.

Here is a link that might be useful: Main Dell Forum