No Power? No POST?
No Display? No Boot?
They all look the same from the outside — a dead screen. But fixing them is a completely different story. Here’s how to tell them apart.
You walk up to a PC and it’s just… not doing anything. Screen’s black. You press the power button — nothing, or something — but the result is the same: you’re staring at darkness.
Here’s the thing: not all dead PCs are dead for the same reason. Whether you’re an IT person, a shop tech, or just someone trying to figure out what’s wrong with their own machine, knowing the exact stage where things failed saves you hours of unnecessary guesswork. Let’s break it down.
No Power
This is the most obvious one. You press the power button and absolutely nothing happens — no fan spin, no beep, no LED glow, nothing. The machine is completely dead to the world.
No POST
POST stands for Power-On Self Test — it’s the very first thing a motherboard does after power arrives. It checks the CPU, RAM, and essential hardware before handing control to the operating system. A “No POST” machine does get power (fans spin, lights come on) but it never gets past this check. No beeps, no BIOS screen, nothing on the monitor.
No Display
This is where it gets sneaky. The PC is actually working fine — it POSTs, it may even boot Windows — but nothing shows up on the monitor. The system is alive; the display path is broken somewhere between the GPU and the screen.
No Boot
You’ve made it further than all the previous stages. The BIOS runs fine, video is working, but when it tries to load the operating system — it fails. You might get an error message, a spinning circle that never ends, a BSOD, or it just restarts in a loop.
Quick Reference: All Four at a Glance
| Issue | Power? | POST? | Display? | OS Loads? | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No Power | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No | Medium |
| No POST | ✅ Yes | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No | Hard |
| No Display | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes* | ❌ No | Maybe | Often Easy |
| No Boot | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ❌ No | Medium |
Still Stuck? We’ll Sort It.
Tech-AD’s support team handles everything from dead PSUs to corrupted Windows installs — for businesses across Delhi-NCR. AMC clients get priority turnaround.
Talk to a Tech-AD Engineer →
Leave a Reply