My desktop is dead

I have an older (~4 years) Dell desktop that I tried to turn on today after a few months of inactivity, and i got nothing. No lights, no beeps, no nothing. The outlet is definitely good, so I'm a bit confused as to what's happening.

I don't really need to use it anymore, but there are a bunch of pictures, etc on it that I would love to recover if possible.

So what's my next step? I have a bit of computer knowledge (on-screen) but I've never opened one up, so this may be new territory for me.

Thanks in advance for any advice. I tried a search but came up empty, so if there is another thread that has my answer please let me know.

 

Make sure that the power supply is not turned off. What you have on the front panel is not the power switch. Thee power supply will have a separate switch.

If the unit is truly dead and you don't care to try and fix it then install the hard drive in another computer and copy anything you want off it.

 

I lost my motherboard (my fault/bad surge protector). Considering what I had and the cost of repairing, it made more sense to go with a new desktop.

When I bought a replacement, I had them mount my old hard drive in the new desk top. The old hard drive was O.K., but it apparently was tougher or didn't see the same jolt.

It worked great, so now I have a 200 gig and a 160 gig. Makes things nice. The 160 can be used as a back-up, but it really not a true independant back-up.

Dick

 

I ended up removing the hard drive last night and will install in a new unit (once i buy one) to recover the pictures. Thanks for the replies.

 

As another option...Consider buying a USB hard drive enclosure. This way, you can put the hard drive from the old PC in it, and you won't have to open up the new PC. Then, once you have your data off the old drive, you can reformat it and us that drive for backups (allowing you to store the backup in a separate location from the PC) or for moving files from one PC to another.

 

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