Crash!!!

[Jerry]

Thunderstorn here late Friday afternoon. Crash, boom, no electricity. Five hours later, Whirrrr, lights come on and ceiling fan starts, but the computer does not, so here I am sitting here now, posting on my daughter's old HP lap Top. The good news is that the problem seems to be the case power supply instead of the Mb and processor. Although,I just got a power supply and tried it with nothing other than the Mb hookedup.It did come on, and I did get a post beep, so maybe I got off cheap ( although new mother boards and processors are kind of like kilts, any excuse to purchase a newer better one.)

[Bob C]

Ouch. I've lost TV sets and telephones to lightning, but never a computer.

At the very least, I hope you can salvage the data from your hard drive.

[Livingston]

No fun at all. Here along the Front Range of the Rockies we have an increadable number of lighting strikes. My best advise is to invest in a top of the line surge protector and replace it every year. Works for me on the computers, phone lines and audio video equipment. Never had lightning take any of it out.........yet (knock on wood)

[smaughazard]

A note of caution: as a designer who depends on his system for his living, I have triple-redundant surge protectors on my computers, but recently had a ligtning strike take out my little LAN. It fried my router, two computers' ethernet ports, and the JetDirect card in my big color laser printer. Seems the strike ran in via the cable modem (which, the cable rep informed me, protects itself by passing any such surge on through!). Moral: even if you have the power circuitry well protected, use a Cat5 ethernet cable with an in-line fusible link as the final connection from your system to the cable, DSL, or whatever. If you're on a dial-up, invest in one of the surge protectors which provides protection for the phone line as well.

[sorcererdale]

I find the UPS's from APC provide the best protection, and they guarantee that any thing hooked to them properly that is damaged by lightning or a power surge is paid for.

We just lost our hard drive, or it is going, as it makes noise and won't let the computer stay booted, just keeps rebooting. This weekend we will see what we can do as our son is the one who built the computer.

BTW, using our lap top and I am wearing my black Survival UK while typing this.


DALE.

[Archangel]

One of the things I learned from a laptop and one of the main reasons I won't go back to desktop is safety from outages. It's plugged into a (theoretically lightning proof) power bar and storms come and go, everything goes out but this things stays on.

Even in the blackout a couple of years back, I was still online.

Sorry about your computer, this was my solution.

[Jerry]

Good news and bad news, the power supply fixed it. Everything seems to be working with no data lost. The bad news is, the power supply fixed it and everything is working. Motherboard and processor upgrades are a lot like kilts, any excuse to purchase a better one. Oh well, I guess I'll get that 64 bit processor and mother board next year.

[Archangel]

Don't you just hate that? The rest of the fam is saying, "Oh, he can fix anything." while secretly you're thinking, "Drat, I was hoping no lights would come, there goes my justification for a MacBookPro!"