My laptop computer has been slowly dying for a while. First the battery needed to be replaced. Then the computer stopped recognizing that there was a new battery altogether, so it has to be plugged in to work at all. Yesterday, when I connected the power cord to the laptop, I noticed the cord’s insulation was coming apart and there were tiny sparks jumping out of the bare wires. This morning, the power cord didn’t work at all. My computer had no battery and no way to connect to the power supply. It was useless. All the programs installed on it, all the information on the hard drive, were completely…