Computer help

My girlfriend was reading her email yesterday when poof, the display dissappeared from the monitor and all she could hear was the fan running in the tower. Now that's all we get. Light is on (power button), fan is running constantly. No display on the monitor, no lights on the keyboard or mouse. Shutting it down and restarting using the power button yeilds the same results.

Does anyone have any suggestions, ideas, or soulutions other than to take it to the woods and shoot it?

Machine is a Dell Dimension C521, AMD 64 Athlon 2, running Windows Vista.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You either have cooked memory, processor, motherboard (or portion thereof), monitor, or power supply. The bad monitor and power supply is unlikely, but you can try them swap them. The next step is to remove the memory and try various configurations, including installing less than the total number of memory sticks. I don't know whether you have one of the Dell PCs with bad capacitors, but if you google that issue, you can determine if your motherboard is subject to bad caps. If you got lucky, you may have just lost the video. If you have a video card, swap in a new one (I have a spare AGP card, if you need one). If it is on-board video, add a video card.

Already tried the monitor, keyboard, mouse swap with other known good ones to no avail. After a quick phone conversation with yet another brilliant NES'r, it appears to be pointing toward a bad power supply. I'm going to try some solutions he suggested in the morning and see where that leaves me. I have another tower here with a bad hard drive, so I may be able to Frankenstein this thing back into operation.

Take a look at the capacitors on the mother board to see if any of them have popped. If so, that's a tell-tale sign that your mother board is blown and will need to be replaced. It's not uncommon with Dell Dimension PCs,,, I've gone through 4 mother boards in the last 4 years on mine. Here's a photo of what a popped capacitor looks like. This is not a mother board, it's a guitar effects pedal, but a capacitor is a capacitor.... note how the top is bulging up instead of flat.

If they really fry, they'll pop completely apart,,,, there's usually smoke involved when that happens.