IT ISSUE · DEVICES AND PERIPHERALS
Computer will not start
Three unrelated failures share that sentence, and which one it is decides everything.Three unrelated failures share that one sentence: nothing happens at all, something happens but the screen stays dark, or it starts and doesn't reach a working desktop. Which of the three it is decides whether this is a straightforward repair or a conversation about what was only ever on that machine.
Which of the three is it?
- Nothing at all: no lights, no fans, no sound.
- Power but no picture, on the built-in screen or an external one.
- It starts, then loops, errors or sits at a repair screen.
- It reaches the sign-in screen but no further.
- It worked yesterday and was moved, unplugged or dropped since.
Establish the failure before opening anything
We work through power, the display path, the storage and the startup state in that order, because each one rules out a different group of causes and they are cheap to test.
If the answer turns out to be the drive, stop. Every extra power-on is more wear on a disk you may need to read once, and the useful question stops being how to repair this machine. It becomes what lived only here, and the honest version of that answer is usually a list nobody has looked at since the day it was set up.