I fully charged the battery then disconnected the mains supply and removed the battery, held down the power button for around 90 seconds then replaced the battery and reconnected the mains power.
Then tried to boot the result was it just froze again, went through the procedure again and tried to enter the bios on the boot and the laptop froze on the bios page.
Tried booting from a copy of knoppix in the DVD drive with the same result. So it looks like the mobo or cpu has failed.
I will drop it into a repair shop for an estimate, if it is going to cost an arm and a leg I will do without a laptop until around October waiting for windows 7
SD
No beeps at all. At least I have recovered everything I want from the hard drive
Max