So as you must already know, we got a
new computer this week and we've been very pleased with it. Right now we have it in our living room and during the day we leave it turned off and unplugged so Jaron can't mess with it. Tonight, after a long evening, we come home and try to turn on the computer. It turns on for a bit then shuts it self off, without even getting to the windows loading screen. We try probably about a dozen times, unplugging everything, checking connections, trying the power cord from the old tower, etc. Sometimes it wouldn't even get past the intial blue HP boot up screen, sometimes it would ask to start up in system recovery mode or safe mode, one time it turned off after entering our password before we could hit the "enter" key. We get freakin out and I pull out the trouble shooting and support guides to figure it out. It said something about a line voltage switch that should be automatically set to the country's voltage in which it was sold. and if you mess with it, it could ruin the hard drive and void any warranties. I notice a little orange switch next to the power cord that says 230. I unplug the cord and flip the switch out of curiosity and notice the other side of the switch says 115. I thought I remember something about the voltage in the US being around 120 or so and that internationally its higher so I start freakin out trying to figure out if that really is the switch. I look at our old tower and, sure enough, that switch is set to 115. So I start calling customer support to see what its supposed to be set at and what happens if its not set correctly. As I'm calling, Corrina suggests flipping the switch and seeing if it works. We're both thinking we totally fried our computer with a supercharge of electricity and that we'll have to buy a new one. It starts up seemingly fine and the customer support says its suposed to be set to 115 but there's a built in circuit breaker that should have prevented the supercharge from doing any damage but he walks me through the steps to discharge any static electricity that may have built up inside the box. Fortunately everything is fine, but Corrina and I are just both amazed how Jaron managed to flip that tiny little switch intentionally or accidentally and we're both super thankful that everything is fine.
2 comments:
holy cow! I'm glad everything turned out ok.
Shirley
Aaron recomends buying the parts to build your own computer. We have an HP laptop that froze up on us this week...all we had to do to get it to work again was to get rid of all of HP's stupid programs they install in it and uninstall them FOREVER. It was a pain cuz we had nothing to use for a whole week but our Ipods!
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