You come home and switch on your system, and the system decides to shock you! This post is part of a series what I call ‘Boot-up Troubleshooter’, with the aid of which, you’ll find solution to the most common boot up problems.
You may face one of the two basic problems while booting up your system :
1> The PC appears dead, ie. the monitor is blank, nothing shows up in your monitor,
2> The PC refuses to boot up completely, i.e. it starts the boot up process, but stops half way through before completion
If you are facing any of the problems, read further. Lets take it case by case, to start with
PC appears dead / monitor is blank / nothing shows up in the monitor when computer is swiched on
May be it sounds silly, but the first thing you need to check is whether all the power cables are connected properly. At times, everything will be right and a loose connection in the network of wires can be creating problem. Check if there is power available to your PC. This should be the first check, not only in case of your computers, but any other electronic or electrical appliances.
There are LED’s and something called a ‘power supply fan’. Check if the LEDs are working and the power supply fan is blowing. When you switch on your PC, the lights on the keyboard should light up, check if you can see that working fine. If they are working fine, then the power supply is pretty much fine.
If your answer was a no, then check one of the following:
> Is there power at the wall socket? The easiest way to check this is to plugin another electronic appliance and see if that works fine.
> Are you using any surge suppressor or any other similar device? If you are using anything like that, try removing them and see if the PC works fine after that.
> Check PC’s power cable and also most modern PC’s have an on/off switch at the rare of the CPU case. Make sure it’s ON.
If none of the above is causing a problem, then you need to get a technician and check if the PC’s power unit is defective and may need a replacement for it. The other possibilities are that you may be facing any one of the three potential problem, that is either the monitor, graphics system or the motherboard is faulty, which needs replacement or repair.