My friend has a Dell Inspiron laptop that was giving off the "7 beeps of death". generally this is a video issue and with some research, we found this an annoying solder issue with the Northbridge of the motherboard. I found several techs were able to fix this by pulling the motherboard and applying a blow torch or a heat gun directly to the chip, to a sustained 450 degrees. This lets the solder heat up and got back to where it needs to be. We read elsewhere that someone had wrapped a laptop in a towel and tried to heat the Northbridge that way that way.

I was skeptical, but there was NO WAY my buddy was letting me put a blow torch to his laptop, no matter how hard I tried to convince him ... So the choice was, let's see if we can fix a PC with a comforter.

Ok - Disclaimer - This is probably not a long term fix and certainly not healthy for your machine. It could seriously damage other components and, I suspect, even pop the CPU. However, since everything is integrated to the motherboard, and a machine with this issue can't boot to begin with - there isn't a lot to lose here.
Here's the process. Just plug in the laptop, turn it on and wrap it up. Let it stay on 15-30 minutes. (15 did not work for me, but 30 did). I doubt I would risk going over 30. I would rather cool it first and try again. I cooled it in a fridge for speed, but you don't have too. Then turn it on to bask in the glory of a boot! It's that simple.

For us, took two attempts but it worked perfectly and the machine has been behaving flawlessly ever since. We'll keep you posted.

PS. Apologies for the low res recording. I only had my old Canon G11 handy and didn't realize I was recording in 640x480. I used AVS Video Editor from the all in one pack to do the mix up. It worked really well for the price.