I haven’t used my PC at home since before my holiday so it’s been a few weeks now since I last fired it up

Bryony went out to visit a friend so I thought I’d get a bit of work done so squeezed myself into my broom cupboard office (that’s literally what it is!) and switched it on

I logged in as usual and started opening applications

Suddenly the whole thing went off and on the screen I got a “no signal” message

I looked down and the lights were still on so I turned it off and restarted

The lights all came back on and I heard the hard disk spinning up but then it stopped and the PC just sat there. Nothing on screen and all I could hear were the fans going round. No POST beeps, nothing

Since I’d heard the hard disks spin up and then stop I decided to start there so unplugged them but no joy

I tried a couple of restarts and eventually it came up

On screen I had the following message

Warning!!! The previous performance of overclocking is failed and the system is restored to the defaults setting

Press any key expect DEL to enter setup

Overclocking?? The only thing I’ve every changed in the BIOS setup on this system was to enable virtualisation extensions on the processer (so i could run Hyper-V!)

I pressed the space bar and was then presented with a message asking me if I wanted to keep the settings or revert to defaults. I decided to keep the settings and take a look once it entered setup

I started to browse around the BIOS settings. The setup program allows you to create a backup so I thought the best course of action would be to do the backup then switch to defaults.

This wasn’t happening though as just as i changed to the backup options the whole thing locked up

I turned it off and back on again and I was back to square one – nothing on screen, lights and fans but nothing else

A tried a couple of restarts again to see if i could get the same message as earlier but no luck

I was very suspicious of the motherboard by now so started taking components out to ensure I got the same problem.

All that I had left in was the CPU and I still wasn’t even getting POST beeps

I put it all back together and still had the same problem

I was about to give up for the night when I did one last reboot and it came on!

The same error message I saw earlier was on screen so this time I chose to switch to defaults and it  only went and booted!

I got into Windows and did a couple of reboots with no problems

It’s Sunday morning now and it came on fine this morning. I’m typing this blog post on it!

A little investigation found lots of instances of the error I saw but all sorts of “solutions” offered

I’ll be taking a backup today as I’m still not entirely confident this is the end of it

As is always the way I’m just passed the warranty period!