Hi blahmaster6000

I suggest that you shut the system down, remove the battery and disconnect the ac adapter, press and hold the power button for 20 to 30 seconds.  Now connect only the ac adapter and wait for 30 seconds and turn on the system.

I recommend you to run diagnostics to make sure all the hardware components are fine. To run diagnostics restart the system and at the Dell logo tap the F12 key every two seconds. This will start the One-time boot menu. Using arrow keys select ‘Diagnostics’ and hit enter. This will run diagnostics on the hardware components of the system which may take around 5 minutes. Please reply to this post in case of any error message and the model of the system.

At least try the battery and power clearing as mentioned previously. There is no way you can run the diagnostics in the state your system is in at the moment.

Now if the battery and power don't work, the next thing to try will be to open the case start removing/unplugging components. I would start first with the hard drive. Now the system wont full boot without the harddrive but if it makes i past the post you have a good idea of what the problem is. After the hard drive try the ram one stick at a time.

What is suspect is happening is some component is causing the bios to hang on post as the bios goes out and queries  the system components.

Well this could be a problem with the bios failing to install the bios update cause the system to bios to die.

2 options you have  .

1. get a new PC and swap hard drives into that on. 

2. if you have dual bios then active the second bios ( should be a 2 pins inside the computer just bridge the connection and the PC should work,)