It is dead. No lights, nothing. My first thought was a dud battery, but should it still work if it's plugged in? Can anyone advise me please? It's five years old and has seen some serious hammer from the kids, so it owes me nothing, and I get the feeling a new one is needed.

Just buy a new one.

If the battery was dead and you still tried to plug it in it would not work.

Poves verdict get a new one.

if you find someone who knows what they are doing you can probably extract the hard drive and copy your files across before you bin it

That's what I did - my laptop completely died, think it was something to do with the motherboard frying - any way, I got my Dad to give it to the computer boffin at his work and he put all my files on a removable hard drive. I'm still yet to buy a new laptop, my life is wank without Football Manager.

I wish I could afford to do that.

No life at all would usually mean that the motherboard is dead, which on a five year-old laptop is almost certainly going to be in the "too expensive to repair" category. Motherboards tend to go for £100+ on eBay, so you're probably best off getting a new laptop.

If you post your laptop's model, I'll have a quick look around. You can grab the hard drive out of your old laptop and put it in a USB caddy to get all your stuff off of it. Then when you're done, format the drive and you've got a nice external hard drive for backups etc. Win-win really.