Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
Rest in Peace, Caligula
There is no dead gremlin lying across a circuit connection within Caligula, waiting to be gently expunged so that my computer can again roar into productivity and entertainment; Byron has confirmed this after an evening of pulling out components to see if one of them was broken and causing grief to the otherwise healthy workings, like a dead but unborn septuplet. We got down to the motherboard and processor without removing an offender, and according to the Dell community resources I found, a lot of folks with my model find themselves about two years into their ownership with a suddenly fried motherboard producing exactly the same symptoms as are displayed by Little Boots, so there it (probably) is.
Excitingly, the Dell XPS 710 uses a proprietary (exclusive!) motherboard layout to fit its generically inaccessible ports into signature inconvenience on the back end of my honkin’ tower, which means that replacements are limited to the stock that Dell has remaining and are way more expensive than they deserve to be for the hardware they represent. Also, because Dell has moved back to the standard, non-proprietary layout for its more recent XPS line, they probably won’t be manufacturing many more, so I feel like hunting down a replacement and paying for it would lock me deeper into a dead-end device. My other option is to buy both a new motherboard and a new tower, and then schlep Caligula’s working guts into it; this is morally correct but financially prohibitive and means that I won’t have a desktop for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, I’m running the universe out of my capable but modest laptop left over from my B.Ed. year at Nipissing.
Its name is The Gentleman Caller and it will service.