SAT Questions

Hi. I found an old abandoned laptop in my new office. There’s no hard drive in it, so I assume it’s had some problems. But I’d still like to see if it’s salvageable. I suppose I could just buy a new laptop hard drive and test it that way, but is there another way I could test the other elements of the computer without going that route? One thing that worries me is that I cannot get it to boot from the CD drive. I have an XP and a Linux boot disk, neither of which can get the computer to respond. It just starts up and then says it can’t find a hard drive.

I do have two other laptops and a desktop that I can use for diagnostics, if there’s a way to hook that laptop up to them and do some testing. Thanks!
It’s a Compaq Presario 2100 series, model 2175US. I have played in the BIOS, putting the CD drive up to boot first – no dice. I have looked through all the manuals on the Compaq website, but didn’t see anything applicable.
Actually, Knoppix is what I used. It’s a borrowed disk, though. I might try burning a "fresh" copy and seeing if that might work.
I created a new copy of Knoppix and verified its bootability on another laptop and a desktop. Unfortunately, the "broken" laptop couldn’t recognize the disk. I imagine there’s something wrong with the CD drive or its connection. It gets power, so the drive spins, but it’s not reading the disk. Any other suggestions? Or should I just write it off, especially if I need to get a hard drive and, possibly, a new optical drive as well?

For the last two days my laptop has been suddenly shutting itself off. It has been getting really hot and I can’t hear the fan. I only bought the laptop brand new a week ago so there can’t be dust or anything clogging it up. I’ve been looking online for options and downloaded Speedfan to monitor the temperatures and fan speeds. The temperature has been running between 65-80C. However, Speedfan doesn’t recognise any fan and I can’t see the fan speeds. Therefore I think my fan is broken…

Is there some program I can use to test to see if my fan works? Something in Bios maybe? I’m using Vista on an Acer laptop.