Trying to fix up an old laptop my sister abused.
 

Alright, so today I decided that it'd be nice to have a laptop to type up documents and so forth in my spare time, and not have the roaring of the fans in my desktop blowing all the time. My sister had been using an old pentium 3 dell for a while and it apparently broke, so I decided to see what I can do. I got ahold of it today, and although I'm pretty good at figuring out software problems, I'm not very good with hardware problems. When I try and turn it on, it hums for maybe 5 seconds, the screen doesn't turn on, and then apparently the entire system turns off. I suppose that maybe the screen is just shot, but then why does it turn off? So I'm assuming it's much more than that. I'm hoping to just try out linux or something like that if I can figure it out, since it'd be nice to get familiar with it, and I hear that it runs on old computers rather well. Anyone have any ideas as to what the problem is or where I should start?

Linux won't help when the thing can't boot. It seems broken - end of story.

See, laptops are a bitch when it comes to hardware issues. They're so tightly packed with delicate stuff, you won't have any luck trying to fix anything.

Besides, getting spare parts is likely to be more expensive than getting a new notebook. That is, if you're even able to figure out the defective hardware in the first place.

And sending it to get even diagnosed runs near a $100 sometimes.

It sounds like it might be a hard-drive failure though, unless you do happen to see a boot menu. If theres no boot menu, I'd guess the motherboard might be shot. The hard drive is replaceable, but good luck with the motherboard.

Well, I'm going to disassemble it anyway and see if I can find anything, it's been out of warranty for a long time anyway. If I can't figure out what's wrong with it, does anyone have any good suggestions for an enclosure for the hard drive? I'm trying to find a good one now, but there seem to be many of them. I might as well get the 12 gb out of it to store documents and transfer files if I can't fix the computer completely.

It wouldn't be the hard drive I would think.

I am guessing perhaps the motherboard (ouch), or the fan is broken and it's overheating very quickly.

Do laptops use POST just like other computers? That may help you out....

I'd like to see a notebook that overheats THAT fast.

True, but possible. I have heard of computers that will just immediately shut down after being turned on because of some heat related problem. More likely than not though, I am guessing some damage was already done RELATED to the heat rather than the actual heat at that point...