Last Sunday we had a power surge due to a lightning that hit our house. Luckily everything is physically intact. The problem is that some of our technological equipments have been fried. Two of our TV's broke and my new tower that I built myself is not working anymore.

To make long story short, When I turn on my computer, the monitor is not showing any picture. I tried another monitor and it says there is no signal. I opened up my tower to see what was happening under the hood... and what I observed was that the LED light on the motherboard is still lighting up. When I press the power button on the front panel It turns on. Fans are working fine.

Here are my specs:
Asus Motherboard Socket 939 w/ AMD Athlon X2 2.0ghz
Video card is NVIDIA GeForce 71000 256mb connected to a D-Sub monitor (VGA).

Today I'm going to borrow a video card from BestBuy to see if that's the problem. But if that doesn't work, what do you think is wrong?

I would assume that your computer can still start since you are receiving power and a signal error on your monitor. However, the question I have is that you don't mention how bad your motherboard is after getting hit by a power surge, and if you could boot up your computer with no problems, then your motherboard is fine. However, usually motherboards don't take kindly to power surges and so they end up getting cook and thus you have to replace it.

Now if that isn't the case, I would believe that your monitor could be fried, and in order to test to make sure it is not that get another monitor that you know that works and then hook it up the PC, the go through booting process and see if you get anything. If that monitor does work, then the other monitor is bustes and must get replace. However, if you don't get a signal from that one, then it's your hardware (which of course you just mention).

The problem you say the lights are coming on but your not mentioning anything about if your computer boots up, you usually can tell by the sounds it makes if the computer boots up. Also do you here any beeps when your computer boots up, if so you have a specific error as well (make sure to count them if you do or describe what they sounds like).

Now if the video card doesn't work, I would suggest getting a motherboard that is working and run that and see what happens, if that motherboard does work, then the other one is fried and has to get replaced.

In short if two monitors don't work (then its the video card/motherboard), if another video card doesn't work (the motherboard is fried).

Oh one more thing, check the power supply to the computer, since the monitor feeds off that as well and see if you can find any charing in it, also make sure to check your cables as well to see if they are cooked as well.

My motherboard doesn't beep at all and I can't boot it up. I already tried using another monitor but still no signal. I'm getting a new motherboard with onboard video so hopefully that would fix the issue, but if that doesn't work then should I replace the power supply?

Oh yeah one more thing: What joule rating should I look for in a surge protector?

This post has been edited by masugidsk8r: Aug 2 2007, 04:51 AM

If you can't boot your computer then your motherboard is completely fried and you just simply replace it and you should be set. As for a surge protector, any surge protector on the market is fine, what I would suggest is go to this site and browse the surge protection there. In that selection choose several that have a combination of many reviews and a rating of 5 on it, and then select from the most affordable price you spend.

But if you replace the motherboard and nothing works, then switch out the power supply, if nothing happens on that well you got yourself a nice paper weight and should bring it to a computer or call the computer brand tech support to see what can be done.

I was concerned with joule rating because my computer was already plugged into a surge protector (which now I know doesn't work). But I went ahead and bought me a surge protector from NewEgg that has 1000 joule rating. Hope this works..

OOOkaay, Thank you Saint Michael for helping me out. My computer is running fine now thanks to the enw motherboard.

But now I have a different problem ( My brother's computer came at the same time my motherboard did and we still had to build his. Now, the problem with his computer is that we accidentally fried the motherboard because we didn't plug in the required 4-pin power cable to the motherboard's 24-pin socket. So what happened was that when we first tried to boot it up, we heard sparks and smelled something burned after and now the pc won't turn on.

My question is: is it just the motherboard that's the problem here? Or even the CPU?

My uncle used to build motherboards from scratch (sodering each circuits and resistors and wahtnot) and he told me that everything should be fine including the CPU. i just have to replace the motherboard. Is this true?

Its the same situation, just replace your motherboard and test and if it doesn't work replace the CPU as well, but this time check the power supply as well as you could have done some damage to it as well. Also I would recommend getting this book; its the same one I used for my computer hardware class and I plan to keep it for a long time and might buy future editions of it as well.

CompTIA A+ Guide

thanks Saint! I'll go and check that out.