A trick to starting up a Laptop

Friend took a new Toshiba laptop back to the shop that just wouldn't start up after coming on a few times previously.

The shop staff pressed the on/off button *simultaneously* with the volume button, and it started up first time.

Have tried to research what is going on with this wheeze, but cannot fine anything.

Is this shortcut a commonly known thing ? And i wonder what it does exactly?

Reply to
john west
Loading thread data ...

Was it showing the BIOS page?

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Safe mode maybe? Was there any sound when it booted this way? Brian

Reply to
Brian-Gaff

Not uncommon to have some strange sequence eg "control, shift, stand on your head" etc to get most computer based devices to enter a different mode. Laptop with detachable batteries normally you take the battery off count to 10 or so and put it back. more fifficult with integral battery machines though! hence what you found. Different brands/models will have different schemes.

My car has one where you insert the seat belt 5 times in quick succession to get it to turn off a warning beep and another more complex one to programme it to accept a different key to open the doors. It's teknology init!

Reply to
Bob Minchin

Odd one I had years ago. I flooded my XK8. Unlikely thing,m but possible.

Man came out and floored the throttle and eventually it started - I would have thought it wouldn't make a difference with EFI and so on, but it did.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

In message , john west writes

I've had exactly that technique on tablets. Was it a tablet-ish laptop?

I've also had an external Samsung DVD drive where the shop had to show me how hard and precisely the place to press on top to get it to eject the dvd.

Reply to
Bill

Not uncommon, that one, it is often programmed in to do flood clearance on full throttle.

Reply to
Chris Bartram

Pretty well all EFI systems have this flood clear mode.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

There is usually something along the lines of hold certain buttons (often but not always on/off and volume up or down) for a certain period of time and magic happens. I find the ones which require you to do it for 120s particularly annoying especially as mine was truly bricked and ended up as a manufacturer replacement under warrantee.

I must have spent twenty minutes on the phone to them doing various sorts of increasingly hard reset before they gave me an MRN code.

Be careful playing with hard resets some on mobile devices it may also zap all memory contents or return the unit to factory defaults.

Another trick that sometimes works if boot fails entirely is leave it on charge for a few hours, disconnect from charger then drop the main battery out for about 15s, reinsert and try again.

Reply to
Martin Brown

It is manufacturer/model specific, different machines have different reset methods.

My thinkpad has a samll hole you poke a switch through as does one of my sat navs. The cuddle is press and hold the vol up and power until it resets.

Reply to
dennis

The other thing that can work is to completely remove the power for a few minutes - with a laptop this means removing the charging cable AND the battery.

Reply to
alan_m

I have a laptop that was originally W7, but some clown had formatted and put Vista on it. No problem I thought, I've got a W7 disk. No way would it recognise the W7 disk. I asked for help on the Windows 7 group, everybody told me to do exactly what I had been doing. Then this nice guy took me under his wing and we did it by telephone. He tried and tried and tried - no good. At the end of the day ------ disable harddrive - boot from CD worked, this on his suggestion. He did not understand this, neither did I.

Reply to
Mr Pounder Esquire

For a long time I used to do this with my Dell laptop. Then one day I learned that holding down the power on button for a little while would cause it to reboot if it froze.

Reply to
Michael Chare

This has been a feature of PCs since the ATX standard appeared 20 years ago. Possibly also a feature of laptops prior to the ATX standard.

All ATX MoBos incorporate a 4 second watchdog timer function in their BIOS to override the OS control and shut power off regardless of how crashed the multitasking/multi-user OS might have become.

Simple OSes like MSDOS don't hijack this power on/off function like windows 95 onwards do using chipset driver software so an ATX PC running just MSDOS will immediately shutdown to a single button press.

BTW, if you've lost control of the mouse or keyboard so you can't select the shutdown operation in the usual way, it's worth trying a momentary press of the on/off button to initiate the normal shutdown process (assuming you've set the default to shutdown without further user intervention) and waiting a while before resorting to 'leaning' on the on/ off button to force the issue.

Reply to
Johnny B Good

In the BIOS/power supply really.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

What kind of laptop specifically? (i.e. windows, or something else)

This may be a tosh specific hack - but its not a general one I was aware of. Not least that most laptops don't have volume controls!

It *is* however a standard trick on many phones and tablets to get into an early boot engineering mode where one can do things like device clear or reset to factory defaults etc.

The shortcut that will work on most laptops that have got into some sort of hung power state (other than removing the battery!) is to push and hold the power button for six or so seconds. That will force them into a proper "off" state. (it works on all PCs pretty much - not just laptops

- its slightly less brutal than pulling the plug)

Reply to
John Rumm

Windows is not a kind of laptop. Windows is not even loaded when the power button is pressed.

Its a hardware thing.

Every one I have had, has.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Its a close enough approximation to distinguish it from non PC architecture tablets and macs. So few people will have x86 based laptops running linux etc to make it worth commenting on, and those few that do are more likely to be aware of the ATX PSU trick anyway.

No shit sherlock...

I have not seen any in the last ten years probably... All have had soft volume controls effected with a Fn/Fx key and usually a numeral key. Hard volume buttons went out with the ark.

Reply to
John Rumm

My Dell latitude has them - fairly common business laptop. Whether they work or not is a different question...

Reply to
Clive George

Macs also run intel architecture.

Ezactly...

??? I am struggling to understand your worldview. You confuse hardware with software and now, you confuse the one button or two with hardware versus software.

All buttons on a computer are 'soft' these days.

What you make them do is software, and what you make them do, singly or in combination, before the OS is loaded is down to the BIOS, or equivalent.

One key press or two - its still software. Just because you have to press another key doesn't suddlenly tirn a 'hard' volume button into a 'soft' one.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.