Lightning must have sent a surge through the phone line because it fried my wireless router and the dsl modem. Now the computer wont turn on although it was plugged in to a good quality surge protector. Can I save the PC ?

When you say wont turn on, what exactly does it do? Any lights come on? No monitor? Any beeps?
If its a wireless modem, it shouldnt have travelled to the PC :confused:

No lights or anything

... and the dsl modem is plugged right in to the pc with a cat 5 wire

Ummm, what I would do is look inside the tower aand see if theres anything obvious, such as burnt spots on the motherboard, etc. Most will have a small light on the board that signifies power. If theres no power there at all, you can remove the power supply and if ya have another one, from a different PC, you can try it to see if it only fried the power supply. Theres generally a fuse in the power supply, some are soldered in and some snap in, so you can take the power supply apart and check it. Hope this helps.

JR...Its probably your power supply. Smell burt? Was it on when it happened? Poke the power supplies power connector that supplies power to the system bd with a milti meter. You should see 5v and 12v I believe. Man its been a long time since I fried a PS.

Plug it into a good known power source. Pull any optional boards out of the pc to see if one fried and is loading down the pc. Re seat your memory strips and processor.

Good luck

Unplug it from the wall, wait then plug it back in. If it doesn't come on, its fried. There is a fuse in the power supply box but its soldered in. You could try a jumper to see if it boots up then replace the power supply. I have seen many fried things in a computer over the 14 years of repairing/building them.
As others said...probally a power supply/mb shorted out.


Kev

Now the computer wont turn
Does the fan in where you plug the main power lead go?
If not, it is not worth while going anyfurther till u replace the power supply box (PSU)in the tower....
Borrow a use one that works from the local computer shop....or buy one, they aren not expensive
Once you have a known good PSU, you can then see if it boots up, how far it boots and start testing...
note these do not protect ftom lightening strike!!! they protect from things like the local boy racer taking out a pole or transforner ONLY.
Be aware, surge can do real werid things, espec if lightning storm thru a surge protector...and the surge protector can be damaged also.
everything may work..but a keyboard causes strange problem
Everything may go well then a few months then the machine starts to crash or the MB just dies one day.
It is best to claim on insurance early on the piece, to do so later causes problems with insurance companies because the actual cause can then not be identified.
I have delt with this problem many times with customers (mainly farmers in rural areas) over the yrs

How about your phones, fax machine, answering machine, alarm system?

Doug, The phones and everything else in the room work fine. Everything that was plugged into the surge protector works except the PC.

I think the power surge came in through the phone line cuz the wireless router was fried and the cat 5 cable that plugged into that was burnt near the plug , the dsl modem next to it was also cooked. The other PC next to the broken computer which is connected by a network cable was unaffected.

Steps the fan does not function and I put in a psu from another computer and no change.

I talked with CDjr on the phone and he walked me through changing out the psu ( after much discussion on F-body cars ) this guy does it all.

Kev I couldn't find the fuse it must really be buried

If you've changed the PS and the PC still doesn't turn on, it possible the motherboard got fried as well.
The surge could have entered the PC through any one of the hard-wired network connections to it, from what it sounds like.

Steps the fan does not function and I put in a psu from another computer and no change.

Call the insurance company lol

Sounds like what happened to my Dell. It took out the power supply and the mother board. This happened 2 days before the warranty expired.

.

Call the insurance company lol

I have a $500 deductible and the computer was a $300 Dell
now I see the printer ( scanner copier ) is shot ---$125
------------------------------my wireless router $75
-----------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------$500 total

coincidence or conspiracy . . . . you be the judge :(

The main thing is that you get your data off the old harddrive.

Is it likely that the data on the hard drive could be lost due to the electrical surge ?

Jr68, the information on your hard drive should be okay. Although everything is connected off of your power supply, I'm willing to bet that your hard drive is okay... but.... ya never know with electrical equipment.

BTW... GO JR!!! :-)

Dwight is right....plug it into another machine as a sec HD and u can then transfer /burn data to disks
Dont forget to take
Favourites
address book
Email achived files

Make sure you change the pins on the drive so its set a as a slave. That's if the pin is set right now as the master.

I am no computer guy at all, but if you need something turned on, soft lights, low music, flowers, jewlery always seems to do the trick for me..........

I am no computer guy at all, but if you need something turned on, soft lights, low music, flowers, jewlery always seems to do the trick for me..........

Mike , did you get that advice from this site ? http://www.askmen.com/

Make sure you change the pins on the drive so its set a as a slave. That's if the pin is set right now as the master.
most HD s are set generically to "cable select"
Whrn connecting to the primary ide cable....the booting hd drive ...orginal one, is at the end of the ide cable....
the easiest what is simply plug it into the ide cable that goes to your CD/dvd drive...copy the files to the main hd.
If you have difficulty reading the hd or copying files from it , post back , there are several tricks of the trade from freezing the hd to creating ghost files and full recovery progs.