I'm an idiot. First PC build. At finish line. While PC was running, tried to quickly reach in to connect power cable to HDD. Finger hits CPU fan, stops it dead. Starts spinning again, couple seconds later PC shuts down and now won't turn back on. Problem so dumb even a Google search didn't have any results.

Would any experts have any advice?

Did this just happen? Maybe just give it a few minutes. I doubt you'd fry your cpu in that short of time, and most modern mother boards will automatically turn off the computer if there's any overheating.

Also you should never connect things when your computer is running.

You could be okay. Try resetting the heatsink on your CPU, and unplugging it/plugging it back into the power supply. It could be that the mobo is no longer detecting it and simply won't boot as a protective measure.

Eh, you're not an idiot.

Can you be a bit more detailed about how it was running before you hit the fan? In Windows and messing around? Or just an initial start up to see if everything was getting power? How long was it running? Any beeps or anything?

Whew, okay, so maybe premature to make a thread, I tried unplugging everything and plugging it back in again, and it worked. Been wanting to build my own PC for 5 years and thought I worked it at the last minute. Must have also jiggled something a little loose. Thanks for participating in my rookie heart attack everyone!

@brendan: Really glad it turned out okay. Stuff like this is why the thought of building a PC terrifies me. When I do finally take the plunge I'm defiantly going to pay extra and get it prebuilt. I get why a lot of people really enjoy building them but the entire process just seems like it would stress me out way too much.

@brendan: Outside of turning it off and on again, reseating stuff works wonders, too!

Happens! Just be glad it happened now and not say 15 years ago. Those fans used to spin so fast, you would have drawn blood, the blade would have snapped, and the computer wouldn't have powered down to prevent a thermal meltdown - it would have just popped the CPU.

@brendan: Since you fixed it I edited your thread title since a great many people never bother to actually read through the topic before replying. Glad you got it fixed.

Since this thread is wrapped off I'll finish off with a little background and the fun things I didn't think would be roadblocks:

I've been seriously thinking about building a PC for 5 is years. Mostly this meant spending probably 30-40 hours a year just researching parts and learning about compatibility. This year I decided on a nice CPU (6500) with a bare bones case, quality but feature light motherboard, 1 stick of 8 gig ddr4 ram, gtx 1050, and 1tb 7200 hdd. Im on a budget and decided to somehow keep it to $1000 Canadian. If you can't tell my idea is to buy a better GPU and a second stick of 8 GB ram next year, buy an SSD the year after that, and on the 4th year get a new CPU and motherboard.

Fun hiccups! As easy as it is to install the CPU, it took a surprising amount of muscle to get stuff like the RAM and especially the power connector s into the pins on the board (those PSU connector pins, HOLY). I got a 3 month Newegg Premier membership and it was way worth it because I did not expect to have no idea where a lot of the little connectors went (stuff like the lights on the front of the case) especially since the PSU came with way more cabling than I needed. Phone support looked up the schematics and coached me through all the small stuff I'd never thought to learn about. Oddly, my motherboard had pins for CPU fan and system (case) fan, my case came with two fans and so Newegg support ordered me a y-connectoe thing that will allow one set of pins to have both case fans running.

I didn't realise windows would come on a disk and had to run to best buy to pick up a disk drive just to install the OS haha.

Installing everything with little learning challenges to overcome and (without the screen being connected and everything) seeing the fans start whirring the the little red lights in the case turn on was a cool experience.

The bios was something I'd never seen before and it was funny not realising that in the bios boot screen you have to switch the order to make sure when you have the windows 10 disk in it boots from the DVD drive instead of the hard drive (which was at the time empty).

I'm lucky in that I didn't have any broken stuff since I'm new at this and don't have a lot of troubleshooting experience but for all the little things ive learned I feel way more experienced already. It's taken me about one standard day to do this whole process for the first time and it feels gratifying. For now on my gtx 1050 I'll mostly have fun playing all my semi-old favourites on Steam (I think I can play fairly new stuff at medium settings or so if I really want to) until next year when I get the graphics card I really want for it. I've only had a Surface 2 for 3 years and simply having a proper OS again is amazing.

Oh, and one other thing. I forgot that the way my home internet is set up, my modem is across the room from my computer and my motherboard doesn't come with a wireless card in it, so in lieu of rudely running an Ethernet cord across the house I now also must buy a wireless card to install on the motherboard. L @ me. Cheers.

Yea, Ive hit my fan a number of times, that wont do anything. If something isnt working, IE no power, monitor has black screen. Its generally a connection issue. Cable somewhere is loose, or need to push down on the GPU a bit and make sure its all the way in the slot.

@brendan: I'm more curious about why you tried to connect a power cable to an internal hard drive while the PC was powered on.

Huh, usually that's how you finish a build. Cut yourself on a fan and that's the blood sacrifice needed to make the computer run.

Glad you fixed it but for future reference i wouldn't try and connect any power sources while the pc is running.

@oursin_360: @gaff: The short answer is I'm stupid. The long answer is I'm stupid but I'm now typing this on the first PC I've ever built myself so I guess I lucked past my stupidity.

Glad you got everything working. As others have said, don't go mucking around inside your computer while its running. It just isn't a great idea. Hard drives are plug and play. You CAN do it, but you shouldn't.

As for your future plans, you should really think about getting the SSD before adding more RAM and upgrading your CPU. SSDs are really terrific!

Nicely done. I've not really put together my own PC before (the one I'm using now I bought all the parts and paid for the guy to put it together for me) but I've been trying to learn more and I am at least confident enough to do stuff like change out the GPU and putting in/taking out hard drives. My PC has been running for close to 5 years now but still feels quite snappy thanks to the SSD and I recently switched out my aging GTX 660 Ti with a 1060, so I think I might be good for another 5 years.

If I may make a suggestion, I would put the SSD as the top priority in terms of upgrades. It really makes the system fly, especially when it comes to booting up or even when launching any programs installed on it. SSD prices were still pretty high when I bought my 120GB SSD but I don't regret it and I'm probably looking to switch that out with a larger SSD in perhaps a year or two when prices [hopefully] come down a bit more. Unless money isn't an issue, I don't think you really need to upgrade the GPU at least for at least 2, maybe 3 years and the drop-off in CPU advancements probably means you won't really need to think about replacing that or the mobo for even longer than the GPU. May I suggest the below in terms of upgrade path?

Year 1: SSD

Year 2: RAM

Year 3: GPU

With that, I imagine you'll be pretty good for maybe 5-6 years (total) before you really need to think about changing parts again OR building a new PC.

@brendan: ha nah, not stupid just learning. Its a great feeling using a machine you built though isnt it? ;-)

@brendan: no shame in posting early. I can't count the number of times I've stuffed things up, made a frantic post asking for help to fix it, before resolving it quickly anyway. Natural reaction I think.

@oursin_360: It feels awesome! I'm definitely more aware of it sitting next to me as opposed to a computer that I would just purchase and expect to work without any effort, but part of that is probably due to having built it only yesterday.

@wchigo: Thanks for the suggestions. After dealing with a bunch of little problems learning experiences I'm probably also leery of the whole transferring my OS from one storage device to another but maybe in a year I'll be more confident. The graphics card I'm afraid of waiting too long to upgrade because I don't really like the idea of having my graphics performance be a large sine wave over a repeating three/four year period. The 1050 was kind of a stop-gap almost and with only 2 gb's of memory I know that next years new games could very well be too much for it. You're probably right that getting a new GPU only next year is a little too soon, but the price jump as you step up in graphics quality seems to be exponential so I like the idea of saving a little and upgrading the GPU every two years or so with an inexpensive mid-quality (1060 type) GPU. Since prices are a lot higher in Canada it was a struggle to keep everything at $1000 with monitor/OS/peripherals so my thought process was to buy a GPU/RAM/motherboard that could last for a while and upgrade other things over the next years in pieces.

@berniesbc:I'm definitely getting an SSD before upgrading the CPU/motherboard (that's a few years off), but RAM is such an easy upgrade I'd probably upgrade both at the same time if anything.

I don't like what it says about me that that made me feel nostalgic.

@brendan: I built my first PC back in September and was so concerned about everything working properly, the OS went on the HDD (I barely knew what I was doing). I was pretty nervous about doing anything (still am) but transferring wasn't that hard since a migration tool came with the SSD I bought. If I can do it, you can too.

You won't necessarily have to transfer. In some cases, a totally fresh install may be better as it may fix some demons that are lingering around and causing some issues. I actually had to do that a while back for some reason I can't remember, and I recall it being relatively painless (aside from having to download and reinstall all the programs that ended up gone with the wind.)

Oh, I agree completely. I'm currently working abroad but I picked up my EVGA GTX 1060 when I was back home in Canada at the beginning of October. It was a bit tough paying probably close to $400 CAD just for a GPU, but I figured it was about time. Plus, if I could get 4-5 years out of the 1060 like I did the 660 Ti, that comes to about $80-100 per year, which is actually not too bad. I'm also still using a 1080p monitor, of which I read the 1060 is fine for 1080p gaming, so I didn't feel the need to step up to the 1070 or 1080 as I wouldn't be gaming at 1440p.

I'd still probably suggest the SSD and RAM upgrades first as those will be, relatively speaking, fairly inexpensive and you'll see the biggest difference in responsiveness out of your system with a SSD in place. Honestly I'm still running 8GB of RAM on my desktop but I have been thinking about if it's time to invest in 16GB of RAM. If you're going the way of low/mid-range GPUs every two years, I could see how that might make some sense, especially if you could recoup some cost by selling the old one, but changing it every year might not be the most cost effective route, even if you are just going the low/mid-range path.

@brendan: Whoops! Totally read CPU where you said Gpu. Replacing a 1050 sooner rather than later definitely makes sense. Dumping that CPU would not. Nevermind!