Dell laptop Inspiron 15 3000 series randomly goes black after shorter periods

My Dell laptop has been acting weird since yesterday. I was working on it fine when It randomly went black, it's like when the screen "sleeps" to save battery after I hadn't moved it in a long time, except I didn't have a low battery and I was still actively working on it. I turned on the screen again and after about 10 seconds it went black again, I repeated this several times with the same result. I also tried holding the power button to turn the computer off and restarting it, but the laptop screen still went black after a short time. This is really frustrating, I have a lot of work I need to finish on it. I need to fix it quick.

I'm not sure if this is related, but before this happened I was working fine on the laptop on a word document, but the word documents kept not responding, or if I tried to close one word document then it would not respond and the other word documents could not respond either forcing me to close them. This happened a lot. It also has happened when I was reading pdf files on adobe reader before. 

I've also been ignoring dell updates ever since I got this laptop last summer so I don't know if that has anything to do with it.