keyboard, touchpad, volume all stop responding, computer seizes within 5 min of boot

[mei0023]

Somebody, please come to my rescue; I am at the end of my rope.

My dell xps m1330 has been unusable for the last two weeks. My computer takes less than five minutes from boot to freeze; the touchpad or keyboard will cease to respond completely, then (if I'm lucky, which I'm usually not) snap back to life with no fanfare a few minutes later. I usually do not lose both keyboard and touchpad simultaneously; often, one will stop responding, then return, and the other will immediately stop responding. Once one of the "seizures" begins, my battery dies within 15 minutes if not plugged in.

(As a sidenote, it's not just the touchpad; the same problem happens when I have my USB mouse plugged in. I refer to the touchpad because it's what I use most often nowadays.)

While this is going on, the disk drive begins trying furiously to eject a disk that isn't there. The touchpad volume display then appears (the translucent black box) and fluctuates wildly between max volume and mute. Ironically, the media center volume controls (at the top of the keyboard) haven't worked since I installed Ubuntu.

To cap it all off, when this happens I am unable to select any of the System/Place/Applications drop-down menus. They will highlight, but the menu itself will not appear.

These crashes are becoming more frequent by the day. When the problem first manifested about three months ago, they would only happen after I'd left my computer on for a day or better. Now, I'm lucky to get in twenty minutes before they start. The last three hard reboots have caused the problems to start as soon as the desktop loads. (I'm writing this on my fiance's computer, as my laptop has--again--frozen.)

I have kept my Ubuntu updated, and made sure to clean the dust out of all the vents. The internal temperature does not spike into critical range, so I don't think it's a heating problem.

In short: HELP.