keyboard and usb acting very strangely

i own a dell latitude d500 and am currently running on ubuntu 6.06 dapper. the laptop is quite old and was earlier used by my brother. The first proble started close to 7 or 8 months back... both the usb ports just stopped working. They wouldn't recognize anything i connected to them pen-drives, mp3-player, camera... nothing. I still haven't been able to find out why. The second problem started a few weeks back... I had switched on the laptop, but all of a sudden during the booting before the mounting of hdd the program entered into setup... there it was constantly typing 5 or 6 so that i couldnt change the time back from that number. When i finally did manage to exit setup and reach the login page for ubuntu the text field was constantly getting typed with `=6 5 continously... at first i thought this was due to a virus but i was told by a friend there is probably a problem with the hardware itself... the mouse was working fine the whole time so i shut down from that page and decided to remove the battery and put it back in... for a time it seemed the problem was fixed... but it wasn't and came back in the same way. i'm writing this from a friends comp now... but i dont know what to do with the laptop... any and all help will be appreciated thank you