I may have elevated myself to almost computer geek status this past week.
Last Sunday, I turned off our home computer and went to bed. The next day, when my wife tried to turn it on, it didn’t work. Nothing happened. We feared a crash but it did not appear that any electricity was running into the PC. So I called Dell (the manufacturer) and their tech support walked me through disconnecting the power source and successfully isolating that as the source of the issue. Once we determined the issue was in fact a bad powersource (I have no idea how it went bad), I ordered a new powersource from Dell.
Well, the powersource arrived today and I am proud to say that I disconnected the bad powersource from the tower frame, the hard drive, the disc drives and the mother board, I then re-connected the new powersource to the PC and then to the aforementioned PC components, closed up the tower and turned the PC on. And it immediately turned on and everything fired up as normal.
What was really cool about this experience is that I really got to see how a PC is put together. It really seems pretty straight forward although I am hardly prepared to go build a PC on my own.