at my house the power has gone on and off lately with my computer still on. and a couple time during the hurricane katrina well actually multiple times. how can this affect your computer?
Hard drives do not take power surges or shut offs very well. If your computer was running a screensaver it may be fine. MAY be fine. If you were encoding porn or something assume that data has been corrupted.
Mostly, the components that take the heat for power loss is the Power Supply and the Hard Drive. The other devices for the most part should be fine.
Do a full scandisk, looking for bad sectors.... and stop using the computer if you think another one will happen! A surge will genuinely mess your precious investment up. A power outage isn't as dangerous, but surges can come with power outages.
yea well actually at the time i was playing counter-strike source. and ive notice when i restart my computer the hardrive makes a noise like its trying to read something yea umm how do you scandisk? OH and also i failed to mention...i have a ati radeon xpress 200(im broke ) and using the catalyst drivers, and set the settings on high and while in a game of CS:S my computer just turned off by itself. Im guessing that its a heat issue or is it cause of the power outage?
Same exact thing happened to me once. Power had already been out for awhile and I never unplugged the power cable. When it finally came back on, it went on and off about 5 times in 10 seconds or so and then I heard a loud POP. It blew a cap on my power supply and, somehow, destroyed my DVD drive. Everything else was fine though.
If you're having constant brown outs get a UPS, get a good one that will work well as a line conditioner too. That will eliminate the problem.
Turning the computer off improperly generally only poses a risk to corrupting data, not hardware. Unless it's a power surge which has the potential to take everything in your box down. If your computer loses power or is improperly shutdown for some reason, the best thing you can do is run check disk. Start > Run > type chkdsk hit OK. It will tell you it can't run the scan until you reboot, hit 'y' and Enter then reboot and let it run.
With Windows 2K and XP it's unlikely an improper shutdown will hose the OS, but a check disk never hurt anyone.