Laptop failure - any advice?

lovelybug's laptop has now failed the same way mine did; I am posting this from a jury-rigged setup made from a broken laptop.

We bought two Toshiba R500-100 laptops (PPR50E-01401TEN) from dabs.com at the end of September 2007. On April 15th, mine did a weird thing - it turned the fans on full, then shut itself down. It would not turn on again; just blink the AC power light amber, in a repeating pattern: short long short short short long short long. So we were down to one laptop for a month; then on Saturday, inevitably, lovelybug's did the same thing.

We can't really afford to hand them to a repair place if we can possibly help it, but my Google-fu is failing to turn up any information on what this fault code means. From Dabs's returns web page, they'd rather we went straight to Toshiba, and Toshiba seem to want us to go via Dabs, so any advice on what my next step should be very gratefully received.

I think I'm suffering from some sort of computer curse.