Dead PC

My home computer (a dead cheap Acer from eBuyer) has died again, which is very annoying. It had a couple of total freezes, where the screen shows what it was doing when it died hours later, but the system won’t respond to mouse moves or the three-fingered salute.

The last time I turned it off after one of those, it wouldn’t come back on at all. Hit the power button, and the fan goes into overdrive. Normally, the fan started in overdrive for a few seconds then went quiet whilst POST and booting happened.

Now, nothing. Fan on high, nothing further. No disk activity noise, nothing on the screen.

This did happen last summer during my French holiday. The machine just randomly started working again after a few days. So, here’s hoping. I’m not sure I can be bothered to strip it down to bare essential components in an attempt to find the point of failure.

This entry was posted in Tech.

3 comments on “Dead PC

  1. jonxyz's avatar jonxyz says:

    Sounds possibly like it’s overheating? It may be too late now to rescue it but its worth a try…

    Maybe check in the bios often there’s a fan speed/temp monitor in there that will give you an idea of how hot its getting.

    Also check all the cards and cables are well seated inside, regular heating and cooling can cause them to walk out of the sockets…with random illogical results.

  2. alexfoster's avatar niles says:

    Thanks for the thought — but it doesn’t get as far as BIOS.

    I shall spend tomorrow wiggling bits of it to see if that helps.

    I knew I shouldn’t have put in all those extra hard-drives!

  3. jonxyz's avatar jonxyz says:

    Wiggling may well help..could be a shagged video card thats taking the whole thing down…or something shorting on the motherboard…or just a loose component….

    Trial and error time!

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