My wife’s Dell Inspiron laptop died last week. The fan will run, but nothing boots up. Took it to the repair shop, and they predicted $200 to diagnose the problem, and $700 – $800 to replace whatever electronics were fried. All this on a $1400 computer. I told them to do data recovery on the hard drive (Cost: $100.), as we were about to replace it with a new MacBook anyway.
The machine is 2 years old, has seen extremely light use, and has been well cared for. Piece of shit.
You forgot to mention it was a Inspiron 700m. While I enjoyed the little laptop, it died way too early. I only used it for web browsing, pictures, iTunes and Word documents. I look forward to a MacBook and not giving my $$ to Dell or Gates.
I had the same problem recently with my Dell Latitude D620: The fan running, but not booting up. Turned out to be a broken memory stick that caused the problem so it was easy to fix.
But my overall impression is anyway that Dell is crap. Just waiting for the next weird thing to happen. And dreaming of a Mac….