yeah, if you download either of them and burn the cd, you can boot to the cd and run some of the diagnostics...either of the cds should boot almost any machine that can boot from cd...also you say thats an optiplex 270, if Im not mistaken, thats a fairly new model and I would think its still covered under warranty...if you get a decent tech on the phone (good luck with that) they can walk you through everything from trying to reset the bios and some other boot options that have sometimes worked...Unfortunately I saw earlier you said you reformatted the drive, I know the 270's we have at my job also have a recovery image on a seperate partion of the hard drive...if you only formated the main partion and the drive is functioning, try pressing f12 while it boots and see if you get some boot options...if you get the menu there should be an option for I believe it will say diagnostic partition or something to that effect. run the hard drive diagnostics, specifically the verify test, a lot of the other hard drive tests will show no failures but the verify usually finds probs if there are any...If that gives you any errors, write the codes down and call dell, if no problems are found, try the restore option from the f12 menu....if all else fails you may just want to try giving dell a call anyway, even if the unit isnt under warranty anymore they may still walk you through some of the other possible fixes....
That and he looks like a Natural Born Killer. 
