This morning I was using MS Word and my machine just SHUT OFF. No power surge. Now it won't start up. I changed out the power supply with the same one it had / NOTHING. A few weeks ago, my son's EMachine C2825 did the SAME THING. We have ordered a new mother board for his after trying everything else. WHAT WOULD CAUSE TWO MACHINES TO DO THE SAME THING? Both are on a wireless cable/internet network that checks out clean. A third system on the network is fine. My biggest concern is how to save the novel I'm writting that is on my harddrive. Is it lost? HELP PLEASE!!!

Hi LadyWriter, When 2 computers have been damaged the same way, you can check the electric extension to your PC. There is maybe power fluktuation in your home line. I think just in the worst case or in extreme bad luck your Hard drive can be damaged. Normally in most cases the Power supply, Motherboard and RAM are the 1st ones to go. When the data is very important, it can be recovered even from the dead hdd(of course costly but possible). In your case I would suggest to: 1. Keep proper backup of your data on CDs(not so expensive but safe) 2. Get an external USB Harddrive just for the data, so you can always plug it to any other system and continue your work. Hope it helps Have a nice Day! Linux is basically a very simple Operating System, but you have to be a genius to understand its simplicity. http://www.cyberscout.net/

EMachines are low end computers. Their mboards are made by a Korean company called Trigem - the computer system may have also been assemled by them in Korea, or somewhere else by someone else. It's quite possible they have el-cheapo power supplies in them that are more prone to fail. This is especially likely if the computer is in a tiny microatx case and the power supply is not physically a standard ATX size, but a smaller microatx size. Power supplies failing is more common these days than it ever was in the past. ATX power supplies are always powered as long as the power to the computer is powered - even when Windows is shut down - they usually fail while you are using the computer and there is a greater load on them, but they can fail anytime as long as the computer is powered. Unfortunately when a power supply fails the damage it can do to your mboard and anything connected to the computer is random - it may not damage anything, or it may trash many things, especially if it shorts out or the voltages go too high before it dies. El-cheapo power supplies tend to have no anti-short or overvoltage protection that shuts them down permanently before they cause damage. With microatx power supplies, it is more likely the ps fan eventually seizes and stops turning, the ps overheats and fries itself, but a dead ps fan will kill any ps eventually, and a defective ps can also fail for no obvious reason even if the fan is okay. If it won't boot, assuming the power supply you tried has enough capacity to start it up, the mboard or cpu could be dead - I have personally seen bad power supplies ruin two mboards, possibly 1 cpu (all the other cpus were fine), floppy drives (5), cd drives (2), a dial-up modem, and a video card. And at least three other examples where it failing did no damage at all. However, the ram and hard drives usually survive. Your hard drive is probably okay and your novel is probably not lost. You can connect the hard drive to another computer as a slave to see if it works and is intact. If you transfer it to another computer and want to use it as C: again, you will need to run an XP Repair Setup to set it up for the computers mboard etc., unless the mboard is identical - you will not lose any of your present data on the drive - Windows will just make small changes to suit the mboard, etc. If you don't know how to do that, we can point you to directions.

I just came across this in another post - how to do an XP Repair Setup, step by step: http://www.windowsreinstall.com/winxppro/installxpcdrepair/indexfullpage.htm You need an XP CD, and the valid Product Key. If you don't have a CD, you can borrow one of the same version as on your hard drive, and use your Product Key.