Main PC dead - close call !!!

[Ali]

Last night I was in shock, today I'm cautious.

Yesterday at close of 'hoffice hours' I shut down the main PC...... a little later when Fli wanted to use the kitchen lappy I turned the office PC on to use that instead ............. well I turned it on but it didn't !!

I got a peep and the fan whirring but that was it - totally nothing else, no boot up, no nothing - YIKES. Dead as the preverbial dodo. Is driven through a UPS. Screen was fine, power to that. Well good job t'was Friday night and I was up to date on work! The office PC is just over a year old - thats all.

Any road erp, this morning I took the casing off and gave it a good 'dry paintbrush clean' in the fans and inside the casing; the PC lives under desk on office floor. Checked all the cards n pushy inny things, looked for shorts. No evidence of anything untoward (first thing usually to go is the power supply).

Put it all back together (the right way up), plugged all the dangly bits back in and fired her up - whay hey result - worked.

So, I don't know what caused the prob coz I did the above at the same sitting.

S'pose it's just a word of reminder:

- back-up your stuff regularly
- take yer lid off and sweep it out occasionally making sure all fans are clean
- do your disk clean ups and defrags through windows regularly
- expect to reformat and reinstall winders every year or so
- use a UPS (Uninterupted Power Supply) its a boxy thing that makes sure the leccy stays level with no spikes and cut outs.

Is there anything else to remember?

[ianh]

Yup - learn to speak geek.

[BartyB]

If it's important you should be backing up weekly as a minimum and storing offsite.
If you have a half decent internet conection you could simply keep all your important stuff online using GoogleDocs or DropBox or any one of the dozens of other providers on line storage.
If you rent server space for your website you could use some of it for document storage/backup.

[Ali]

Set to 'windows back up' every nite now, but also back-up once a week on my docs and pics separately. Scary stuff when PCs go awol!