I've got a Dell Latitude Cpi that I bought from surplus a while ago. Doesn't exactly work and I would like to get it working. Suspect it's the hard-drive as it turns on fans spin but nothing else happens. Screen never comes on, so that may be it, who knows?

Anyways, I am wanting to borrow somebody's hard drive that has a dell latitude cpi or one that fits in the slot. Basically just wanting to see if I can get it to boot.

Try pulling the drive and see if you can get into the BIOS. If you can't get the LCD to come up, try connecting a monitor to the VGA-out, if you have one. If that doesn't work, try pulling all the RAM. That should at least get it to beep angrily at you.

Tried all that. No Screen coming up w/ vga out. No angry bleeping. any other ideas? I'm willing to toy with the innards.

You've pulled the RAM and the hard drive...and it gives you no angry beeping...

If that's true it sounds like the motherboard has a problem, in which case that computer is only good for its spare parts...

You could try pulling the CD/DVD drive as well, if it has one...

Yep, pretty much. If you can't coax any beeping out of it then the mobo or proc is probably shot. Or your PC speaker is broken :)