Assorted MacBook Pro Issues

Hello All!

I got pretty good feedback on my last issue (which seems to be in remission, for what it's worth) so I figured I'd try again.

New problem!

About a week ago, I closed my fully charged 2010 17" Macbook Pro, packed it into my laptop bag, and went to a friends house a few hours away. I was a dummy and didn't turn it off, but just let it sleep. By the time I got there and opened it up, the battery had died naturally. I opened the lid and it started doing that thing where it saved the desktop right before it died and it's loading it back-up. I don't know what that's called.

It didn't finish that process, I guess there just wasn't enough battery left. Ever since then, things have been weird.

The battery does not respond. If I unplug the laptop, it shuts off immediately. However, the battery icon always shows the battery fully charged at 96%.

Also, occasionally when I boot the MacBook now, it momentarily has the wrong date and time.

Sometimes the chimes don't happen on boot.

And the last symptom: occasionally, the brightness keys do not work. On boot, it's stuck at whatever brightness it was last at. There isn't even an option for brightness in System Preferences.

I looked into it a bit, and discovered that clearing PRAM has helped some of those symptoms. Everytime I boot, I clear the PRAM and that fixes the brightness issue.

I try resetting the SMC, and either I did and the laptop just doesn't act differently, or else I didn't because I didn't enter the keys correctly on start-up.

I'm figuring this is probably a software issue, and not a hardware one, but I'm no expert. Just seems like a bunch of unrelated systems started acting glitchy.

There's been no damage to the laptop lately at all as far as spills or drops or anything like that.

Anyone ever had any issue like that?

I know I know, take it to the Apple Store, but money is in short supply right now, and a triple-digit or worse repair for something that technically is still working isn't in my budget right now.

 

Bump?