On Thursday the screen for thedesktop I use suddenly went black, the desktop appeared to have lost all of its power and I lost all of my work. With some difficulty I was finally able to get the desktop in to safe mode but on restarting Word, it didnt do the automatic recovery of open documents. I think it happened once or perhaps twice before. I am very worried by this due to serious hardware problems when this was a daily occurrence before the screen finally reported hard drive problems and packed up totally.

Does anyone have any suggestions/ideas as to what might have happened this time?

need more info


are there still lights on the puter?
is the fan still whirring?
or is it a complete powercut?

i presume its not a powercut in the house

I've had sudden failures before. One computer did this because a fan broke and the computer was getting too hot, many motherboards have a temperature sensor and will suddenly turn the power off when the temperature gets too hot. You often get these sensors in the bios so you can check what the temperature there.

The other reason was to do with the power supply being knackered and not providing the correct amount of power to do the job..

My only association with problems of this sort is always bad news, ie techie problems which I dont know how to fix. I did an immediate check for an electrical power failure but radio and monitor light worked so it was the processor.

I also wondered whether it could have been the heat; about lunchtime on Thursday when it was very hot. It took ages to get back up and running which I was finally only able to do after frequent reboots, f8's safe mode and active desktop recovery.

Worry: I'm in between systems, zip drive suffers "click of death" syndrome so I no longer use it and save everything to hard drive which I'm not really happy about.

Although processor now works , I am anxious it is something I need to be concerned about in the longer term.

Hope this is enough to be going on with.

sound slike the psu could be on the way out

That doesnt sound very reassuring; do you mean the power supply unit and is that expensive to replace?

Also I think it took a bit of time to power back up again. When I was able to get it to switch on (which really was only a minute at most) it didnt even get to the Windows logo and as far as I can recall it only showed an expanded view of my wallpaper and wouldnt even call up the application icons or system bar.

Originally posted by wendygs
Worry: I'm in between systems, zip drive suffers "click of death" syndrome so I no longer use it and save everything to hard drive which I'm not really happy about.

Have a look at Steve Gibson's website (http://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq5.htm) where COD is covered in detail including details of how to get COD zip drives replaced - even when out of warranty:thumbsup:.

Yeah, I know and my experience of dealing with all of these organisations is the work involved becomes a major project which quickly develops in to a massive file of email/letter and the like. I think COD is still in the early stages and as I believe my new system will be ready for me in about 4-5 weeks (cant arrive soon enough :clap: :clap: :clap: ) , I'd rather avoid all of the work involved primarily because I'm so swamped with urgent stuff that I cant cope with anything new. In the meantime, it's just this psu problem which is a bit worrying


NB Owing to non-IT related technical reasons outside my control this purchase has been put off indefinitely. :(:( :( :( :help:

If you do end up needing a new PSU, they are anything from £20 upwards (ok, you can get cheaper but it will probably stop working before the end of the day!). It takes about 5-10 minutes to fit and is pretty straightforward.

I'd agree with the various comments about heat issues - if in doubt it never hurts to throw in another fan or two :) Ideally you shouldn't be venting any hot air produced by the cpu etc through the PSU (it produces enough heat of its own), so if that's your only outlet fan then you should install some more... You can judge roughly by how much hot air you can feel with your hand, but you have to know what to compare it to!

At least it sounds as though I dont need to think in terms of another hard disk failure which isnt my idea of a joke. Hopefully I wont need to replace the psu either and I'll have my very own PC before it becomes a consideration.

Thanks for all the inputs. Much appreciated and feeling far more reassured than I felt before posting.

Originally posted by wendygs
At least it sounds as though I dont need to think in terms of another hard disk failure which isnt my idea of a joke. Hopefully I wont need to replace the psu either and I'll have my very own PC before it becomes a consideration.


If you're really worried about potential HD failure, can you not try the HD in a different PC?

If it boots & starts looking for drivers, at least you'll know the HD is pretty much OK.

Originally posted by sccsux
If you're really worried about potential HD failure, can you not try the HD in a different PC?

If it boots & starts looking for drivers, at least you'll know the HD is pretty much OK.

thats normally what "us" geeks (lol) would do BUT the general user dont have the means, knowledge, expertise or even another computer to put memory, hard drives into tbh

Melttheball hit it bang on the nail; dont have a spare computer; dont have resources to get another to check out HD; although I am a tad more IT literate than most, not sure I could do the work involved.

I am ALWAYS worried about potential HD failure because I've had it happen x2; first with a dodgy dealer and 2nd on an IBM from JLP supposedly a recipe for success which proved as much of a disaster as first for different reasons.

It's worth running a system health monitor to avoid damage from fan failure etc. Speedfan is pretty good as it will shut down the system before critical temps are reached, additionally it will monitor voltages and hard drives if they're SMART enabled.

Motherboard Monitor is very similar but I don't think it has a hard drive monitor.

Both are freeware.

Thanks for the suggestion. How do I find speedfan and what is SMART enabled - also what does that mean? Is this something I should check out with supplier? Contacted supplier who'll look at power supply and will replace it because it's not expensive.

OK, GB thanks for that suggestion. Now that I've downloaded and installed speedfan, please advise me how to use it because I've looked through the help files none of which makes any sense to me at all. It's way beyond my level of technical competence. Thanks wendy

Originally posted by wendygs
Yeah, I know and my experience of dealing with all of these organisations is the work involved becomes a major project which quickly develops in to a massive file of email/letter and the like. I think COD is still in the early stages and as I believe my new system will be ready for me in about 4-5 weeks (cant arrive soon enough :clap: :clap: :clap: ) , I'd rather avoid all of the work involved primarily because I'm so swamped with urgent stuff that I cant cope with anything new. In the meantime, it's just this psu problem which is a bit worrying

For technical reasons outside my control, the purchase of this system has been postponed indefinitely.:help: :( :( :(

If you need a second system, I have a Celeron 533. It's certainly not gaming standard but would be ok as a spare you keep in a cupboard and bring out for testing or web browsing and such.

I think the biggest problem is, and this is with no disrespect to you Wendy or anyone else new to computing, is that PCs were originally business machines and not designed for home use.

They are far too technical compared to home computers of the 80's like the Commodore 64 or the Spectrum where you just switched it on and away you go.

A PC is like a house of cards and one minor glitch can bring it crashing around you. There are thousands of variables in a computer system and, to be honest, I'm pretty amazed they work to the level they do!

Books and weekly magazines are all well and good but they can't explain everything due to the different parts in different machines, and they become out of date so quickly.

Originally posted by wendygs
OK, GB thanks for that suggestion. Now that I've downloaded and installed speedfan, please advise me how to use it because I've looked through the help files none of which makes any sense to me at all. It's way beyond my level of technical competence. Thanks wendy

You don't need to do anything with it - it just tells you the temperature of the HDDs, CPU and fans. If there are flames showing beside the temps., then it is concerningly hot. (http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b157/kentboy/speedfan.jpg)

Originally posted by kentboy119
You don't need to do anything with it - it just tells you the temperature of the HDDs, CPU and fans. If there are flames showing beside the temps., then it is concerningly hot. (http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b157/kentboy/speedfan.jpg)

Thanks kb, right now I am really very keen to get click of death zip drive probs sorted. With everything else on I dont have the time to deal with this myself. Please see my 2 voice loss threads for fuller details and if you can help kick start Iomega to sort it out without putting yourself out that's great and if not I do understand.

Many thanks wendy

Originally posted by alchresearch
If you need a second system, I have a Celeron 533. It's certainly not gaming standard but would be ok as a spare you keep in a cupboard and bring out for testing or web browsing and such.

I think the biggest problem is, and this is with no disrespect to you Wendy or anyone else new to computing, is that PCs were originally business machines and not designed for home use.

They are far too technical compared to home computers of the 80's like the Commodore 64 or the Spectrum where you just switched it on and away you go.

A PC is like a house of cards and one minor glitch can bring it crashing around you. There are thousands of variables in a computer system and, to be honest, I'm pretty amazed they work to the level they do!

Books and weekly magazines are all well and good but they can't explain everything due to the different parts in different machines, and they become out of date so quickly.

Thanks Andy for such very kind generosity. Various technical issues need to be resolved and unrealistically I thought it would all be resolved in an eye-blink.

I endorse your comments of complexity of PCs/home users. I am aghast at how many people walk in to Dixons/PC World in the unrealistic expectation that they can walk out with a PC, plug in, switch on and off they go. :mad: :loopy:

From my first-hand experience of the extremely sharp practices of IT industry as a whole since 1997 all the indications is that the facts are otherwise. There is only so much you can learn from mags/book/internet; the rest is hands-on experience and training.

I've also PMed you regarding your very kind offer.

Gratefully
Wendy