Inspiron 660 issues.

I bought this machine second hand with what i thought would be a fairly simple fix that's proven to not be very simple. i'm having several weird issues, when i first powered it up it would boot (hard drive would power on fans would begin to spin) for about 1-2 seconds nothing on the screen etc.

well i replaced the ram reseated the cpu and it booted. however it only booted about twice until i actually powered off the system rather than just restarting it. it seems when the system is powered off it enters the same cycle. occasionally it will fully boot after a full power cycle, but that's very rare it seems. reseating the ram seems to allow the system to boot fully, i've used several different sticks that have been verified by memtest86 to be fully working.

i noticed it was using an older version of bios a09 rather than the current a11 but! i can not update it because everytime it gives an error about intel ME. i tried to install the intel ME drivers and it says my system does not meet the system requirements. this is all while running on windows 8.1 with the drivers downloaded directly from dell. i know this is a bit of a laundry list of problems it's just confusing and while i didn't spend a lot of money on the system the hardware seems to work so i'd rather not just toss it. 

if anyone has run into any similar issues please let me know if you were able to do anything to fix this. i've googled this to death and either the posts go with no resolution or the resolutions do not work for me.

thank you for read and your time!