In this step-by-step tutorial we will teach you what you should do if your computer doesn’t turn on in order to identify and solve the problem.

By “computer doesn’t turn on” we mean that your computer is “dead”, i.e. nothing shows up on its screen. If you can see something on the screen your computer IS TURNING ON and thus we won’t cover what is happening with you computer in this tutorial (if this is your case you have a different problem: your computer isn’t loading the operating system – i.e. isn’t booting. We may cover this situation on a future tutorial).

The main problem with users facing this situation is that they start trying several different things without a standardized procedure and by the end of the day they don’t remember what they have already tried anymore. Worst than that, many assume that they understand how computers work, which is usually not the case. A good example is users saying that the motherboard is good and “trying to boot” because they can hear the hard disk drive spinning. This is nonsense, as hard disk drives will spin as soon as they are powered on, even if they aren’t connected to the motherboard, just to give you an idea of nonsense things we’ve seen people saying in our forums.

So we recommend you to follow our tutorial in the same order we are publishing it. Don’t assume that any of the steps is “silly” because they aren’t – many will start to disassemble the whole computer just to find out later that a defective USB drive installed on one of the USB ports was preventing the computer from turning on, and by following our guide you would have detected this problem right away.

If you have already tried several different things, please forget what you have already tried and start our guide from scratch. Don’t jump any of the steps just because you have already tried what we are saying. The order we are presenting each step is very important and just because you have already tried something before it doesn’t mean that repeating that again will produce the same effect as before.

Of course other professionals may suggest a different guide with different steps or a different order. This guide we are publishing is the result of almost 20 years of PC maintenance experience and in our opinion is the best way for you to troubleshoot your PC.

Ready? So let’s get it started!