First of all, tell three very different situations apart : the machine does nothing at all, it powers up but the screen stays black, or Windows starts and then fails.
"It will not start" covers faults that have nothing in common. The few checks below will either get you going again, or let you describe the symptom precisely - which saves a great deal of time in the diagnosis.
The problem is electrical. In order :
If nothing changes, it is usually the power supply, the motherboard or, on a laptop, a power socket that has come unsoldered. Those are workshop repairs.
The fans spin, the lights come on, but nothing appears. First make sure the problem is not the display itself :
A series of beeps at startup on a desktop is a diagnostic message : note the rhythm and the number, that is valuable information.
The maker's logo, then a restart loop, a blue screen, or an error message. This time the fault is in the software or in the drive.
Windows has a recovery mode that opens by itself after three consecutive failures : switch on, and as soon as the logo appears force a shutdown with a long press on the button. Do that three times. On the fourth attempt the Automatic Repair screen appears.
From there, Advanced options gives access to three useful tools :
Never start a reset or a reinstall until your data is safe. A computer that will not start almost always holds documents that are perfectly recoverable - as long as nothing has overwritten them. If your files are not backed up anywhere, stop here and call someone : see recovering files.
Diagnosing a startup fault means isolating the guilty part by elimination : power supply, memory, drive, screen. We come to you for software faults, and take the machine into the workshop for hardware faults that need dismantling. The diagnosis is free and the quote comes before any work.
Not necessarily. That freeze often comes from a USB device plugged in at startup, or from a lost boot setting. Unplug everything connected, USB sticks and external drives included, then try again.
In most cases, yes. If the drive is not physically damaged, the data is intact and is recovered by connecting it to another machine. A startup fault is not data loss.
That depends entirely on the cause : a software repair is nothing like replacing a motherboard. Since the diagnosis is free, you know the figure before committing to anything.
Would you rather we took care of it ? See our computer repair at home service, in Lyon and across the Rhone.
Free diagnosis and a quote before any work, in Lyon and across the Rhone.
Automatic assistant: it can make mistakes. Never share a password or a card number.
