Why Won't My Laptop Turn On?

Before assuming the worst, try a different power cable and wall socket if you have one to hand — a faulty charger or a dead cable is a surprisingly common cause and costs nothing to rule out.

Listen and look for signs of life: fan noise, lights on the case, or the screen briefly flickering. If there's any activity at all but no display, the fault is more likely the screen or graphics than the whole machine.

Complete silence with no lights usually points to the charging circuit, the battery, or in some cases the motherboard — none of which necessarily mean the machine is beyond repair. These are individually replaceable components in most laptops.

If the laptop worked fine yesterday and simply won't switch on today, it's more likely a component failure than anything you did. If it happened straight after a spill, drop, or power surge, mention that when you bring it in — it narrows down the likely cause considerably.

Your files are usually unaffected by a power fault, since the storage drive itself is a separate component. If the machine won't turn on but you need something off it urgently, that's a data recovery job rather than a repair.