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?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.