Windows Program or Hardware Problem??

Yesterday, I was working in Microsoft Word.  I was saving to the A drive on a 3.5" floppy.  After about 2 hours of work, I got an error message saying that Windows Explorer had to shut down and restart.  It automatically did this and successfully rebooted Windows.  All of my initial applications loaded fine.  After about a minute, Windows gave me a message saying that the system has recovered from a serious error.  Apparently, there was a problem with the explorer.exe in the Temp folder.  After I saw this message, Windows gave me another error stating that it had to shut down and restart again.  This cycle continued until I decided to totally shut down windows.  When I turned the power back on, my computer froze at the back Windows welcome screen.  I did this about 3 or 4 times.  To me, this seemed like a software problem.  So I turned off the computer again and let it sit for awhile.  When I tried turning it back on, the pc beeped and the moniter alerted me that there was no signal from the computer.  Now this seemed like a hardware problem because I couldn't even boot up the computer.  I finally called Dell.  They took me through a step by step process, trying to deduce the problem.  At first they thought it was the memory.  I have two memory sticks, and we tried taking one out, then the other, and so forth.  The technician on the other line seemed to think that there were no problems with the memory.  She said it was a problem with the processor and that I need to have it replaced.  Before I spend 200 bucks on a processor, can anyone verify this problem??  Would the error messages Windows gave me be related to this hardware malfunction, or is this a different problem altogether??  Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks.