Hi there, I was woken up bout half an hour ago by my family, because they had run into a problem which I assumed was minor.

My mother pressed the sleep button by accident at one point, and the monitor refuses to switch back on. They tried to reboot, but nothing was happening, hence waking me up early. I had a look, tried rebooting myself, checked the connections at the back, everything looked fine, no changes whatsoever, the monitor would declare that there is "no signal" and switches itself off while the PC is still on.

Is there a way around it at all? I tried rebooting, I would still get the same problem on their PC. Their operating system is XP.

tried pressing the "wake" button?

Did it actually reboot? If not and nothing else works, hold the power button to shut it off, wait ten seconds then power it back on, and you may want to run scandisk if it doesn't prompt you to.

Tried those options, took it to a mate to have a look, turns out the motherboard was fried. Funny side of it was, since my Dad bought it Christmas 2004, hes never opened it to clean it out, so just imagine how much dust was in there over the years.

Had to hoover it out before he could have a proper look lol.

NEVER hoover an electric component. The fast moving air causes static electricity which happily jumps over to your motherboard/HDD/GPU/... and fries it.

If the board was allready dead..u are lucky that u didnt kill other components while hoovering.

Wasn't me that done it, I think he was just joking when he was cleaning the PC out.

And this brings me to hijacking this thread: how to clean properly a pc without frying it?

Sorry BigDave

Quote from Fabri91 :

And this brings me to hijacking this thread: how to clean properly a pc without frying it?

Sorry BigDave

Dont know whether this is the right way, but i have been doing this for years and all is fine.

1.Disconect all cables at the back.

2. Take the side panel off the pc, and then while touching the PC with one hand, touch another metal object (like a radiator) for a few seconds to de-static the computer and avoid frying pieces when touching them.

3. Get a soft paintbrush, or something simliar, and slowly and gently brush dust and particles off components of your computer. Also, if you have a fan on top of your heat-sync (which is most likely), then unscrew the fan, and then brush over the heat-sync and get the dust off, as alot of dust can gather there.

4. Whether you have put the dust on the floor, or its all in the bottom of the case, vacuum it up using either a brush add on, or use the soft brush again slowly "sweeping" the dust into the vacuum.

5. Put it all back together, and job is a good un'!

oh, and dont forget to plug your fan back in

or just try to wait at least 15 seconds because my monitor does that after my system wakes up so try it it might work

Quote from Nathan_French_14 :

Dont know whether this is the right way, but i have been doing this for years and all is fine.

1.Disconect all cables at the back.

2. Take the side panel off the pc, and then while touching the PC with one hand, touch another metal object (like a radiator) for a few seconds to de-static the computer and avoid frying pieces when touching them.

3. Get a soft paintbrush, or something simliar, and slowly and gently brush dust and particles off components of your computer. Also, if you have a fan on top of your heat-sync (which is most likely), then unscrew the fan, and then brush over the heat-sync and get the dust off, as alot of dust can gather there.

4. Whether you have put the dust on the floor, or its all in the bottom of the case, vacuum it up using either a brush add on, or use the soft brush again slowly "sweeping" the dust into the vacuum.

5. Put it all back together, and job is a good un'!

oh, and dont forget to plug your fan back in

Thanks.
I guess many people have forgotten nr.5





It's not mine, don't worry.

Thats one filthy PC

Keep it by a bag of sawdust?

What's your graphic card?

I have to admit. I'm amazed that thing ran at all with that much dust in it. I can't believe the processor didn't overheat to the point of instability with that much dust in the heatsink.