I've just been asked to look at my Bulgarian friends (there are language issues) Satellite A210-19D laptop.

On boot:
The hardware powers up when connected to mains power
The CD drive is read in the boot sequence
There is no hard-drive activity
There is no display
The screen setting is not set to external monitor, I've toggled between.
The fan is running
The battery does not hold a charge.

My friend suggested that the hardware was overheating.

Any guidance wrt what the difficulty might be/what I should be considering would be most gratefully received

My next step would be see if the laptop boots to a bootable CD such as a Ubuntu Live CD. If nothing happens at that point (no display, no hard drive activity) then the hardware may be toast.

Have there been any recent hardware/software changes to the system?