laptop possibly run hot

I have a dell inspiron 1545, intel pentium dual core, only two years old. My nephew took it to iraq for two tours. Started to copy a video from his phone and it just quit. All I can get out of it, is it will turn on the fan just for a second , then shuts back off. Tried reseating ram, battery; pulled the battery and held down switch for about twenty seconds;still no change. Any other suggestions? Need to get it fixed in case he goes back again.
Thanks

 

Is it clean? After two tours in Iraq I bet it's pretty dirty on the inside. Another thing you could try would be maybe replacing the thermal paste on the CPU.

 

yea Spock, it was fullof sand that looked like makeup paste. I cleaned it out. I found the cmos battery and removed it for about 30 seconds also. Now it comes on when you plug the power on ( not the screen though) and continuosly powers on and off. The dvd also runs, but no screen. You have to totally disassemble it to get to cmos battery. I noticed they have paste on the cpu and what appears to be a substance like sponge on the other chip. can you put paste their as well? I tried balling it up and then pressing it flat again, but that might be my problem now.

 

What do you mean balling it up?

 

I mean I rolled it into a ball and then flattened it back out so that it would cover the chip again

 

IT could have been banged up, heated up and have a MB problem. Could be sand is still blocking critical components. Did you use an air-hose to blow it out?:confused

 

ww.youtube.com/watch?v=o7rPqCvCt0g
How to apply thermal paste. You don't roll it up.