Quote - The blue screen of death is most often caused by installing new hardware. A reinstall often fixes the problem, but you have to be careful and pick a repiair, and not a clean install, otherwise all your files go away. Your nephew should be able to use the Dell recover disk to re-install the operating systme for you, 90% chance that will fix it. You may have to re-install a program or two, but not always.

I tried to do a restore, but the CD drive won't open to allow me to put in the disk.  The computer has to be "On" in order to open the drive, and whatever lights go on when I press "On" last for a second or two and go out, and there is zero sound of any kind coming from the machine.  It's totally dead!

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi