What to do when a power outage or surge damages your PC - ratliffgaceaddly

Sharon Hanan wants to know what to do about her husband's PC. A power failure left it unusable.

Electricity doesn't ever behave itself. Sometimes a power surge can fry a piece of your computer, rendering it useless. A spike arrester significantly reduces the risk, but it's still a possibility. And yes, a power outage often ends with a power surge.

Should an electrical disaster leave your Personal computer useless, you'll want to protect your data, and so figure out what's damaged. It's easier and cheaper to supercede a power provide than a whole computer.

[Give a technical school question? Expect PCWorld Contributing Editor President Abraham Lincoln Spector. Send your interrogation to answer@pcworld.com .]

If you don't have a backup of your information (and you should), ill your library files is your first anteriority. See my instructions on ill files from a dead PC (you can in all likelihood skip the part nearly Sound Mode).

Erst you have your files back (assuming the calamity didn't break your hard effort or SSD—more along that below), you need to work out which part of your PC is fried. You can father a good idea by how it fails to boot.

Might issue

If the PC doesn't good turn on at wholly—no lights, no sounds—the trouble might make up the motherboard (more than on that below), but it's probably the power supply. If you have a tower PC, that's a reasonably inexpensive and loose replacement. You tail end buy power supplies anywhere and likely swap them outgoing yourself.

That's not the case with a laptop. Unless you're extremely skilled at this kind of thing, I'd recommend taking it to a professed.

If your PC turns on, then turns cancelled once more, it's probably the motherboard. But in that location's too a slight possibility that the selective information in the CMOS has been scrambled. To find out, chance the small, coin-like battery on the motherboard. Take it, wait five transactions, insert it over again, and boot. You may be in luck.

But if that doesn't solve the problem, IT's your motherboard. In this case, you should probably buy a new computer. A unused motherboard in effect gives you a new computer anyway.

If you really want your old computer back, you might reclaim information technology with a motherboard identical to the original. David Milman of computer repair company Rescuecom told me, "we can [frequently] find replacement motherboards on eBay for nether $100.00, and putting them in usually takes 'tween 1-2 hours."

If your PC boots to the BIOS concealment, or an error content, or just a blinking cursor, the damage is probably to your intramural hard drive or SSD. (You may take over already discovered this when you tried to restore your data files.) You can replace the driving relatively easily. The hard part, if you father't have an image backup, is reinstalling your in operation system and programs, and recovering your data files. You'll probably have to institutionalise the drive to a information recovery service and hope for the best.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/419101/what-to-do-when-a-power-disaster-bricks-your-pc.html

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