Something wrong with your PC? Find the fix in minutes.

The fans are spinning, the lights are on, and your monitor just says "No signal". It's a scary moment, but it rarely means something is dead. Most of the time the cause is one of a few simple things, and some of them take less than a minute to rule out. The trick is checking them in the right order, so you don't end up taking the whole PC apart for nothing.

Your PC powers on, but it never gets as far as the logo or the BIOS. No picture, maybe a beep, maybe a stubborn light on the motherboard. It feels like anything could be broken, but a failed POST almost always comes down to one specific part, and there's a methodical way to find it without buying replacements first.

A small light on your motherboard is glowing red, orange or white, and the PC won't start. It looks alarming, but it's actually good news: the board is pointing you straight at the part that needs attention. Once you know how to read it, you can skip most of the guesswork, and the fix is often simpler than the light makes it seem.

You've spent hours building your new PC, you press the power button, and nothing happens. It's a horrible feeling, and the first thought is usually that something arrived broken. In reality, a first build that won't turn on almost always has a simple cause that's easy to miss. Before you start ordering replacement parts, there are a few checks that solve most cases.

Your PC sounds like it's about to take off, and you're not even running a game. Is something broken? Usually not. A loud graphics card almost always comes down to one of a handful of causes, from a game menu running at 500 FPS to a fan bearing on its way out. The good news: most of them take minutes to fix, and you can usually tell which one you've got just by listening.