Roasted Toasted Dell Laptops

[TraumaRN]

Funny yet sad story, friend of mine has a dell laptop, running with an old Pent 4 Northwood core in it, things always been a spaceheater , well she comes home today after accidently leaving it on her long thick shaglike carpet for about 10 hours...she comes back to a black screen with a blinking cursor at the top. She calls Dell up and manages an american tech support dude who tells her I'm sorry to inform you have spaceheater, and tells her to do all this funky stuff...none of which works, however she's coming over tomorrow so I can take a looksie at it, anything I could possibly do? Since the computer doesnt even boot to BIOS/POST(at least from what I could gather from her) should I just take a look and declare it a loss? or maybe take out the HDD and at least see if her system file is corrupted/be able to save her data?

EDIT: Dell had her 'cool' it by removing the RAM and HDD and dusting it out with an aeroduster and then trying to reboot...