Just a quick message to bemoan my poor luck with technology of late. About a month ago my desktop PC blew up. No smoke or bangs or anything dramatic like that - just the briefest whimper of a fan spluttering into life for a fraction of a second as I turned the machine on, then nothing. At all. Aha, I thought, this is most probably a simple case of my power supply deciding it's had enough.
Unfortunately, work and children prevented me from doing anything immediately, but the other day I finally managed to order a replacement PSU which arrived yesterday.
"Hooray", thought I, "an evening's work of carefully unplugging and replugging components and all will be as good as new" (actually better, as I had taken the opportunity to upgrade the PSU wattage!).
Taking my time, so as not to make any mistakes, I spent an hour ensuring that all of the cables led exactly where they previously did and then held my breath as after putting it all back together I pressed the power button. The renewed whirr of the fans and the glow of the LEDs truly were things of beauty to me and I sat on the floor basking in the joy of having my PC back alive (and also rather pleased that my initial diagnosis had proved correct).
Now, this is the important bit. I'm not a computer engineer (in fact the plugging in of the components did stretch me a little but i got there in the end) but I'm certain that when you turn on a computer something, enything, should appear on the monitor, other than the message I got which said "no signal". I do remember that prior to the breakdown I could see things in the monitor (pretty colours, moving pictures, MS Windows logos - that sorth of thing). This is no longer the case, and I honestly don't know what to do. So I'm fed up and an writing this message to let off some steam.
The situation is not helped by the incidental fact that last week our oly other computer (my wife's laptop) also decided to die in a big way. The good news is that we have a new laptop on order, but I can't really afford to replace my desktop as well, and replacing the components leads to escalating costs (e.g. if I have to replace the motherboard, I'll also have to replace my video board as it's an old AGP model and I may also have to replace the RAM).
Ah well. If anyone has had any similar issue with their computer and it had a simple, obvious and above all cheap solution, I'd love to hear from you.
Inscrutable