In last night's storm, my computer froze. I have very limited computer knowledge. I shut the power off to turn the computer off and now I can't get the computer to turn on at all...What to do?

I need to know if you were using a surge protector.

Make sure you have it plugged in, and if you have a shut off button/switch on the back, make sure it is on. Then try to power up.

Do you know of any lightning strikes near your home (or just very loud thunder directly after a flash) ??? Do you have an onboard modemcard that was connected to the phone ??? I had it twice in the last years that a nearby lightning strike destroyed friends internal modems through the phone line. The computer did very strange things after that but after removing the modem card the computers wirked again. I think they've been very lucky nothing else was damaged. If you have a similiar setting try to remove the card and start again. It can also be the fuse of your power supply. If your very unlucky the lightning struck the power line somewhere and you got too much power. It may have destroyed something on your computer. My first guess would be the power supply as the voltage had to go through it first in that case.

I may sound crazy by saying this but check it out. If your case has a spring loaded power button, there's a good chance this will work... Make sure your computer is off, turn off your power supply (if it has a switch, if not, unplug the cord) and hold in the power button for 20 seconds. I don't know why this works... but I've had a few OEM machines that had this problem when powered down "the hard way". The first time I called tech support and they hooked me up with that bit 'o info. And the second time it happened, on a different machine, I just tried it and it fixed it. Hope this helped. EtDiGiTaLiS.