It was the video card!!!
After being a week without my XPS M2010, I had to register on this website to thank everyone for their posts and invaluable information. I was experiencing the same problems previously mentioned with my laptop. One day the screen just froze, and I was forced to do a manual shutdown. After doing so, the laptop failed to boot and nothing displayed on the screen. I had purchased this laptop on eBay at a good discount about 18 months ago, and apparently the seller had never actually made his payments to Dell for it, so Dell refused to offer me technical support. I have a bit of experience with working with computers, but I had never taken a laptop apart before. I was in serious bind, however, because I used this machine as the main computer for my office and Dell was not cooperating even though the warranty on the laptop itself had not yet expired.
Well, based on the recent post by ferrari26, I bought a refurbished video card on eBay and decided to tempt fate. I followed the very detailed instructions on Dell's support website to disassemble the machine and fortunately replacing the video card didn’t prove to be too difficult. The worst part was breaking the cheap plastic tabs holding left side cosmetic cover to the top cover, but this was a small tradeoff to being able to use my machine again. My first moment of joy was learning that the hard drives in this machine use SATA data and power connections. Fortunately, I was able to remove the hard drives and recover the data by connecting them onto another desktop.
Unlike the other posts on this thread, I never had to replace the motherboard to get the machine working again. After reading the other horror stories about Dell’s refurbished parts, I guess I got lucky that this video card worked on the first try.
I apologize for the long post, but I wanted to share my experience with everyone. Although it is a beautiful machine, it appears that the M2010 has a design flaw. I was never a fan of ATI video cards anyway, but this experience just further solidifies their lousy reputation. Best of luck to everyone! Thank you once again for your posts.