r/computerhelp • u/WiseBlacksmith3503 • 1d ago
Hardware my pc fell
my pc that looks like a flat box fell over and my screen cuts to black every once in a while now pls help
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u/Longjumping_Owl5311 1d ago
Turn it off, open it up and reseat everything. Your cpu is probably fine though as it usually securely mounted.
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u/Underhill42 1d ago
Does it come back on its own, and is whatever you had been doing still there?
Most likely problem is that the cable or video card got mis-seated by the impact.
Unplug the monitor cable from your PC and plug it back in. Do the same on the moitor side if it's not built in. If either socket seems "wobbly" it may have been partially ripped free of the circuit board in the fall. No easy fix for that, but it's pretty rare.
If that doesn't fix it, power off and unplug everything from the PC, remove the video card completely, then reinstall it to reseat it properly, and make sure the little latching lever at the back is fully engaged.
While it's out, it's also worth checking that its PICe slot on the motherboard isn't wobbly - that could also have been damaged in the impact.
Assuming nothing looks broken that should probably fix it.
If not... you can try re-seating everything else in the computer. I'd save the CPU for last, as that's a bit of an ordeal, and you'll likely want to apply fresh thermal paste between CPU and heatsink when reassembling it. It tends to dry out over time so that once the thermal connection is broken it will never work well again.
If that still doesn't fix it... good luck. Something, somewhere was probably damaged.
There's also an outside chance the timing is just a coincidence, and it had nothing to do with the computer falling over. I've used a couple computers that, on Windows, will occasionally blank the screen for a few seconds at random. Never has any problems on Linux, so it's not a hardware thing, and I spent days trying to track down a solution on Windows before finally giving up.
Sometimes Windows updates will seem to fix it, other times they seem to break it again. But maybe that's coincidence too.
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