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Harpoon

So there we were, minding our own business....

Family was just finishing up lunch and I was sitting at the table enjoying the last of my Ovaltine when I happened to notice the computer screen go blank and the computer turn off then right back on again, but the screen stayed blank...

Hmmmm...

I went over to fiddle with it, tried restarting it again, checked all the connections.

The lights are on but nobody's home....

Won't even start booting up. :confused:


Now we're computerless until sometime next week. Grrrr.....


Money comes in, money goes out, money comes in, money goes out....



Just once I'd like to have a week when I don't have to pay for ANYTHING except maybe gas and food. :mad:
 
Hey Harpoon

Hey Harpoon

GAS and FOOD will drain you, enough. :eek: :eek: We have an older Surbuban sp? and I have a Caddy..and they stay in driveway.. Only drive our little GEO Tracker around.. Price of food is awful, too. Guess too high gas prices...for delivery, ect........Glad it was only your computer...So many neighbors are having to replace their A/C's Now, that's a bundle... :eek: Hope you can get back on-line soon. Where were you posting from? Bonnie
 
Harpoon-

Here is a link on how to get into "Safe Mode", then you can do your utilities (Scan Disc and Defrag) from there, that is if you can get into it. I know it has worked for many people. Gets you out of the "black screen of death"

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/chsafe.htm

It certainly is worth a try rather than pay to have someone else fix it.

Most of the time all these things are from a fragmented drive, and sometimes you have to do two or three defrags to set things right, turning off the computer after each utility session to clear all the junk.

I'm sure Ross will have great suggestions.
 
Must be the season for spased-out computers! My husband's just had a hissy fit and lost a great deal of his business information. We were extremely fortunate that a good friend is a computer whiz so we overnighted the thing out to him and he was able to retrieve a lot of the information but the rest is just gone! What a mess!

And, after the fires last October, we had some friends stay with us for a few days because they lost their home. We also had no power for a few days and eventually we had such power surges that everything with a circuit board (including our computer and thank goodness we were thinking of replacing it with a new one anyway) fried! That was an expensive mess!
 
If that sort of thing didn't happen to me all the time, I'd laugh about it, but it ain't funny when it happens. Around here, it happens everyday. If it's not a computer it's something else.
 
We have a fan, no A/C.

Computer wouldn't even come up enough to enter safe mode which I know how to do. I'm actually pretty good at fixing a lot of software problems in my system and can handle stuff, but not when the monitor won't even show a picture.

Possible that either the videocard blew out or maybe something wrong in the motherboard. Whatever it was, it was well beyond my abilities and I handle most software repairs on my own.


For anyone who's curious, I'm about an hour southwest of Buffalo, NY near Interstate 90 which runs coast to coast.... You can see Canada from my house if the air is cool and clear.
 
To me, it sounds like the power supply bit the dust or the motherboard went on permanent vacation. Were all the fans working before the big failure?
 
My son and I build our own PCs from parts. Does you MB beep when you try to boot it? If so, how many times or how long? A video board can be replaced easily, if that's the issue. Lots cheaper than a new PC
 
Depends on what you computer is NOT doing--no lights, fans--dead power supply--replace and you will usually get the hard drive to boot. Had a machine in one of our labs that kept crashing--put in another power supply and viola got it too boot--unfortunately it had crashed so many times a lot of files were damaged so I re-imaged it. (Not something one can usually do at home :mad: )

If you get no BIOS beeps but some lights (hard drive, floppy drive) you have probably got a dead mother board. Bad video cards, etc you will usually hear the BIOS beeps, and possibly the hard drive boot, but will get no video or get BSOD's (Blue screen of death).

Hope this helps

Joan
 
Harpoon,

I had the same symptoms on my computer in November of last year. I thought it was the power supply but I tested it and it was working fine...it was the motherboard. The computer was just over one year old and I had bought the latest and greatest of everything and spent over 1,500.00 for it. Well long story short, the warranty on the motherboard (1 year) had just expired. My options were to pay 200.00 for a new motherboard, put it in myself, and hope it worked...or buy a new computer with a faster processor and a larger hard drive but with a cheaper graphics card and less memory for 600.00. I bought the new computer, swaped out the memory cards (old computer had 1GB vs. 512MB with the new computer), and sold the processor, graphics card, and the 512MB of memory to a guy I knew for 200.00. So in the end it cost me 400.00 for the new computer vs. 200.00 to buy a new motherboard and try to install it myself. For now on I'm going to buy cheap computers and throw them out when they go bad! :rolleyes:
 
I gotta call today from the computer folks, they say there's NOTHING wrong with it.


Figures....


Damn thing probably just wanted to get out of the house for a day, a mini-vacation.... :rolleyes:
 
overheating? tol'ja it was that fiddling around with it. It must be female. We don't like to be overly overheated and we get headaches if you overheat us too often. Over and out.
 
Here's a good one, while I was trying to add a reply to this thread my computer here at work blue screened on me!!

Yes overheating can trigger a shutdown, been so long since I've worked in an over heated lab I forgot about that. (They keep it so cold in the lab here that I have to wear a jacket when it's 100 outside!!) You can adjust the thresholds for shutdown in the BIOS settings so that if you work a warm place it won't be constantly shutting down. We found out one hot day that Bob's Dell emitts a strange chirping sound when its getting overheated--I just rebooted it at the time and found out about the overheating alarm a few days later when I was telling another techie about the strage sound coming from Bob's computer.

Did you get your puter back, and is it still working--sometimes computers will work in the shop (just like cars) and then not work when you get it home? :rolleyes:

Joan
 
The computer is back in it's parking spot below the desk. It seems to be ok....

Dunno.

Just keeping an eye on it for now....

I may make some adjustments as to where it's located and ventilation over the weekend here...
 
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