Season Change and StaticFollow

It's that time of year again!

I went to flip on my PC the other day and it hung on the blue HP logo screen. I cycled the power once, to see if it was a burp, and it stayed there. It didn't load any peripherals including keyboard, and as such I wasn't able to access the BIOS or use an emergency boot disk or anything.

Now, the first thing you do when this happens is check to make sure everything is plugged in. It was.

So the second thing you do is unplug everything, and crack the case open in case something funky is going on in there. (I lost a motherboard to capacitor plague once. It's a sad, sad sight.)

There wasn't any funk in my case, but there was a lot of dust, so I took some canned air and blew it out. Plugged everything back in, and it booted like a charm.

The next day, Lahurah called me because her PC wouldn't boot (and I get used as local tech support for a good many of my friends.) Almost the same deal . . . her computer wasn't even getting as far as a logo screen, since it's that custom PC she won from a contest here last year (we call it the Goddess Box.) Power cycling did nothing, everything was plugged in.

So I told her to grab some canned air, and give it a good dustout.

Bam, her box booted up without any problems.

After discussing this with another computer savvy friend of mine, she said that it was probably a build up of static electricity that hit critical because it's cooled off enough and we're just now turning on the heaters. Either blowing out the dust or fiddling around with it discharged the static.

Either way, it's probably a good idea to take some canned air and clean out your PC, if you haven't done it in a while. Nothing scarier than trying to boot up your box and getting deadness!