I got an inspiron 6000 from a friend who said it would not boot. I found the cause, which was one of the USB ports was missing the little plastic spacer, and shorted out whenever something was plugged into it. It worked fine for a couple weeks when that USB port was not used. One day, I was using it and it died, and a little smoke came out the right grille. Now, when I try to power it up, the Caps/Num/Scroll lock lights come on, and after about 5 seconds, it shuts down again. There is no video, and seemingly the fan does not work, but the hard drive spins up. It does this on both battery (fully charged according to the lights), and AC power. I 'drained the power' and took out the CMOS battery for a day as suggested in the No POST tutorial, but it still will not boot. As a little experiment, nothing changes when the RAM is removed. I disassembled it, and nothing seems to be toasted. I suspect a dead mobo, but I want to confirm this.

EDIT: Would the Dell BIOS choke on a dead fan? It actually has been about 4 months since it started, and I just now dragged it out. I'm thinking that the fan could have blown up, and that would be the cause of it not spinning.

This is usually kimsland's job, but here is the no post tutorial.
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic113137.html

I already tried that, but thanks for trying. Also, I forgot to mention this, but it does not beep. It is silent except for the hard drive spinning up and subsequently stopping.

Sorry to bump it, but I'm kinda getting desperate...

Hi tpwman. I have 100% exactly the same problem. The fan does not spin up, HD works. 5 sec and it powers down. After trying to turn on and off 30 times it started the fan and I got a boot screen. Then the fan never worked again and no boot screen of course.