I hate computers....

[nduli]

Woke up to find that my computer is fried. We had a power outage last night and it was on but in sleep mode, when I tried to start this morning it just won't start up. Black screen and that's it. Right now I'm using an ancient laptop to access e-mail but forget about scanning or printing. Hopefully it's a cheap fix, I can't imagine what happened, I

Comments

[_patches]

That's happened to people I know and it wasn't fried. Unplug the computer and push the power button. Wait a few minutes and then plug it back in and try to turn it on then. If this works the computer just fubared itself and you have to completely unplug and do the above to fix it.

[nduli]

Well...that worked! Thanks! I feel like a total tool. :P

[shockwave77598]

Ah, Patchs beat me too it. Glad to hear you are operational once more.

[_patches]

It's the most maddening thing with the easiest solution. Glad it worked. :)

[siege]

Sounds like this is a bios or motherboard error, where the sleep feature crashes the power switch when power goes out. (These days the power switch is normally a "soft" switch, which does not directly control the power, but relies on the bios to tell the motherboard when to turn on and off.)

I haven't had this problem before myself; I would just press the power button until something happened, then try again if nothing did.

Also, SpinRite is high on my recommend list. It fixes disk errors, unless the hardware itself is dying, and prevents errors that might happen later. That and regular backups. Get an external hard drive and backup the stuff you'll miss if your disk crashes.