Computer said BANG!

Hi all

I just thought I'd share this with you. The other day we had a series of strange power disturbances in our house. All power would very briefly go off and then come back on. Thinking it was just an intermittent mains problem, I dismissed it once the power was back on. Then I was on here, just finishing a reply to a post, when BANG! said my computer, and once again all the light sin the house flashed off briefly.

So my main computer has failed:(

When I get chance I will open it up and check see what I can see, but it just goes to show, we shouldn't leave stuff on longer than we need to, not just because of the waste of electricity, but because we never know when a faulty appliance is going to give us bother. Although obviously I didn't want my computer to blow up, seeing as it was going to at some point, I'm glad it did so at a reasonable time of day when we're all still wide awake. It would not be nice for a faulty electrical appliance to play up during the night when we're all asleep.

I think there's a lesson in there somewhere.

 

If you can afford it get an external hard drive and copy everything on to that. My son who is a trainee architect and keen photographer saves all his work and pictures to an external hard drive. He had some stuff on the computer hard drive and copied it on to the external hard drive - very important stuff. Twelve hours later his computer hard drive died. he then went out and bought a second external hard drive and spent many hours copying one hard drive on to the other so he two copies of everything.
I have a laptop and do have an external hard drive. A lot of stuff i save direct on to the external hard drive. If you save it to the computer hard drive i find the computer eventually starts getting clogged up and going slower, especially if you take photos - my photos are all about 8MB each so soon fill up the drive. External hard drives are relatively cheap compared to what they used to be. I have never been happy with CDs. I dont find the software 100% and you soon fill up a CD if you have high resolution images. Over the years the software for burning has produced too many files that were unreadable due to errors.

 

Hi all.

You're all right about keeping backups. I do, so I'm not worried about loss of data. My word of caution was meant more about leaving mains appliances on in general. For the fault in my PC to make the whole house black out for a few seconds, it must have been some power drain, possibly a short circuit (although I'd expect a short to blow the fuses but it didn't). That kind of power drain is going to make things get very hot, very quickly, so my caution was really more about fire risk.

Periwinkle - I like your thunderstorm story. Years ago the mains cables outside our work took a direct lightning hit. It was really quite spectactular. There was a flash and a loud bang, and all the power went off. The circuit breaker was damaged. When we got power back on we found that 3 PCs and one server were completely finished, and several more had had there hard disks corrupted.

 

Can't you get a device that sits between your computer and the mains, they have multiple sockets, and they are supposed to stop your equipment from being fried?
External harddrives are relatively cheap. my son has recently bought a 1TB hard drive which is pretty big off Amazon for about £70 and it was a decent make. i have now discovered he has 3 external hard drives. The point of this latest one is that it is the back up drive. It is so big that he can back up both of the other two drives on this new one. With his work he produces huge graphic files that take hours and hours of work to produce.

 

Surge protection, but that only helps if the computer is sound but the mains plays up. In my case it was the other way round. My computer actually played up, and nearly took the mains out with it. I guess it needs a new PSU. I haven't opened it up to have a look yet.