:Lightning Strike.

[aryan57]

Was online yesterday morning when there was a bright lightning flash followed straight away by a clap of thunder so it must have struck very close. A blue spark shot out of my CRT monitor and the PC went dead. Seems like it wrecked my power pc supply although the lightning did not cause any fuses to blow. Everything was plugged into a surge protection strip and this seems not to have worked as advertised. The fuse inside the power supply is intact but it will not switch on. Can it be repaired at reasonable cost or should I get a new power supply. Its a 300 watt ATX.

[guru]

Wow, a CRT monitor.......I haven't seen one of those in a while!

The bad news is that if the strike was enough to blow your relatively tough PSU the fragile main board, memory and processor don't really stand a chance. You may get very lucky and get away with a replacement PSU however in my experience after an event like that there is not normally much salvageable from the machine. On the last lightening strike PC we had in the machine was so badly damaged that the chips on the hard disk controller had melted!

The good news is that if the surge protector was a branded one you may well have some comeback as most offer substantial connected equipment guarantee's. Worth checking I would say.

[aryan57]

Thanks James, I am no longer tech savy, just got too old to keep up with everything.

I was given 2 17"CRT monitors, an IBM and a Mitsibishi, since they both worked fine, I used them. I want my moneys worth from everything. Despite a spark from the CRT, it still works fine. My old machine was 10 years old, it did what I wanted but was getting slow anyway. The hard disk seems to have survived but who knows about the motherboard or memory? So I have decided not to waste time and effort on them, I will dump the old machine and move on.

My son has given me a PC, its a Dual Core Opteron with 500 gig hard disk, with Windows 7 installed. All this means nothing to me, all I want is something that is reliable and works. I need to find a way to import my data from the old hard disk to the new machine. Fortunately, I copied some data a week back to a DVD so all is not lost. Its just a problem I could have done without.

[BlueRover]

Just put the old drive in the new pc and copy the data across (or just use the old drive as a data drive and delete the Windows directory).
I suspect both machines would use an IDE drive, look for a wide, flat cable of 44 wires and a 4 pin power connector.
Once you fit it, the machine will probably recognise the drive and assign a letter such as E: if the newer machine has a single hard drive and a DVD drive.
As for CRTs, I've a Belinea 22" which uses a Mitsubishi tube and although not as sharp as my LCD is great for colour matching photographs for printing.

[SJG]

Just put the old drive in the new pc and copy the data across (or just use the old drive as a data drive and delete the Windows directory).
I suspect both machines would use an IDE drive, look for a wide, flat cable of 44 wires and a 4 pin power connector.
Once you fit it, the machine will probably recognise the drive and assign a letter such as E: if the newer machine has a single hard drive and a DVD drive.
As for CRTs, I've a Belinea 22" which uses a Mitsubishi tube and although not as sharp as my LCD is great for colour matching photographs for printing.

Now you have lost me!!

[TDHFastback]

I'm going to have to do a google translate. I don't understand Swahili

Kate

[scoobyh123]

Sometimes surge protection strips need to be unplugged from the mains before they "reset" themselves, could this be why your PC isn't powering up? In many respects the lightning strike may have done you a favour. I still have 2 old XP computers that although still connected online don't really work that well anymore for the simple reason that most servers and web hosts have upgraded to Windows 7 or higher a long time ago! As such, pages are slow to load if they load at all, if they do then very often there are errors on the page and so on. I bought a Windows 7 dual-core thing back in May/June time and although on the face of it at 2.8Ghz it is slower than my old XP running at 3.4Ghz, it is in fact faster.Why? Because of the dual-core. Basically it is 2 processors both running at 2.8 Ghz so the old PC would need a 5.6GHz processor to compete. I daresay you'll find similar with the one your son gave you.

[aryan57]

Thank You Dave. A week later and everything has moved forward. My son has connected the old hard drive to the new computer and I can now access my old data. I have switched Windows 7 to the Classic Interface and it is now easier for me to use. Cant say I have noticed that everything is much faster as I use my PC mainly for going online and writing the occaisonal letter. Discovered that there is no 64 bit driver for my printer after writing an important and urgent letter.But it seems one can use Virtual XP to get around this problem and therefore use a 32 bit printer driver on a 64 bit machine.

I stuck with my old system for so long because it was stable, I understood it and it always worked when I needed it. Just like my 820, it never let me down. I have finally been dragged into the 21st century LOL.