I was browsing late last night when my PC suddenly clicked off but the power LED stayed lit. I had to hold the power button for a few seconds to get the LED to shut off. After a little while I went to power back up and . . . silence. The power LED turns and stays on and the LED from the sound card very briefly turns on, and there is a soft click from the PSU along with maybe a millisecond whisper of a fan trying to start up, but essentially silence, nada, nothing. Oof.
Pretty much has to be the PSU, right? It’s about 6 years old and I admit I can’t recall the last time I dusted out the case, so I imagine that protective layer of dust finally suffocated the poor thing. I did try another known good outlet but no joy. Sigh.
I will dust it out but it still didn’t power on after sitting for hours overnight, so I am resigned to the walk of shame to pick up a new PSU. Any other thoughts?
Yeah, I’d check the power sockets and cables first, then the PSU. The first PC I ever built didn’t power up. I just got an LED light and… nothing. I was about to start dismantling and reassembling it when I decided to just check the socket it was plugged into and… voila, there was power. It was a dicky socket. It’s a very quick and easy thing to strike off your list anyway.
Most likely, but not necessarily. I’ve seen (ages ago, admittedly) a bad HDD triggering whatever electrical protections there were to prevent further damage. Which is a good thing, even if annoying.
Add me to the list of people who had issues with bad power strips and sockets in the past. I thought it was an underpowered PSU that would have trouble under certain conditions, but when I took it to Microcenter they had no issues, so I replaced my power strip with a new UPS and that solved my problem.
Only one SATA SSD inside and a creaky old 660 GTX Ti. CPU is an i5-4690K on a Gigabyte Z97X board.
If it’s the mobo or something else that will suck, as I was not planning on building a new rig until maybe the early spring when the current Ryzen/RTX shortages have fully resolved and perhaps even after the next Intel drop. Plus, I don’t have much free time to build or game now anyway with a 2.5 week-old newborn demanding service on a regular basis. :p
Isn’t it nice that you can still post and look for help on your phone? Back in the old days when our PCs went down, we were suddenly cutoff from the world at large too until it was fixed.
I know, right? I wrote the original post on my phone but now I’m on my iPad Pro. I also have my work laptop that I can use for light personal browsing if needed.
I recently built a new PC and had a similar experience turning it on: brief power light, fan noise, then nothing. I had a spare PSU and that wasn’t the problem. After a bunch of troubleshooting trying various spare parts, it turned out my brand new GPU was part of a bad batch. I was able to get return shipping and a full refund with no problems. So it’s possible it’s not the PSU.
Not if some circuit fused creating a short circuit, due to heat or minor impurity in production. When you look at everything that happens inside a computer, it’s amazing we manage to make failure very rare, but with so many minuscule parts used in a variety of environments, there’s no way to guarantee nothing ever fails. Certainly not at consumer prices, and assuming enough care to do a good job.
They were also completely unimportant for the operation of the PC. Or at least, I’ve never seen a battery failure cause issues. I suppose nearly anything is theoretically possible.
