Did a solar flare screw up my computer last night?

Last night I was about to shut my eyes and go to sleep, and so I put my computer on sleep. Only as I did this I noticed that the digital LED display on my digital radio went off, which is odd because the radio was on, and it's ALWAYS on when the radio is on. At exactly the same time my computer went all weird, and instead of going to sleep the fan started whurring and it didn't seem to turn off. The keyboard lights were still on, and the on light was still at green. Multiple efforts at clicking and pressing things failed to rectify the situation and in the end I had to restore normal functionality by holding down the on/off button to restart in safe mode. I never have any problems like this with my computer, which is a pretty solid Windows 7 Sony Vaio. I wouldn't have thought this was particularly out of the ordinary though if it hadn't coincided with my digital radio also acting weird, and at the time I considered the unusual coincidence might be down to solar flare activity, which is known to affect electronics equipment.

So today I googled solar flare activity and low and behold it turns out there has been a lot of activity recently.

Sun sends 28 solar flares erupting through space in a week... and there may be more on the way | Mail Online

Do you think this is a reasonable theory?

No it's fine. It was also the middle of the night so the sun was behind the earth. Strange that both things happened at the same time though. I'm going to run CCleaner and do an sfc /scannow to check everything is in order, have had a few minor problems in the past week.

My digital radio led display has never gone off while the radio is on and I've never had any issues putting my computer to sleep.

Aliens?

My mobile phone was sitting next to both as well, could a spurious burst of EM energy from somewhere have caused this? I just find it odd that both things happened concurrently.

Fair enough. Someone was probably charging up their hybrid round the corner at the Shell garage.

I don't get how something like could affect my tronics in this way, would it likely have been a spike or the power going down? either way both these devices have electronics built in, voltage regulators and such like and I don't see how this could have occurred in the way it did. Why would the led display go off and the radio still on on my digital radio?

I hope it wouldn't harm my computer anyway. This is a great machine, but the power socket on the left has always been a bit loose. It is an ex display model I bought and always wondered about that. I have a mobile phone that wont charge unless I wrap the cable round it in a certain way, it doesn't connect for some reason. I'm still in warranty, but don't want to get it replaced by some new fangled windows 8 machine. Win 7 is really the most sturdy OS I have ever used by far and I want to keep it for as long as possible!

ThrashZone said:

It's one of the best reasons to have a serge protector on a computer,
If it's a desktop a combination backup battery/ serge protector is best,
Power supply is the most common link in a radio and computer.

I am amused by the concept of a "serge [sic] protector," which I guess would be a device to protect twilled cloth from lint. A surge protector would be more useful for such things as computers.