absolutely baffling tech question

Obā-san

ok, so this morning, when i went to turn on my new laptop, it would not turn on. the charging light was on, but pressing the power button did nothing.

I was pretty distraught, but i figured i should google to see if it's something well known with this laptop. and, the highest voted suggestion was to do the following:

1. Unplug the laptop

2. Remove the battery

3. Remove the RAM (this is the weird bit)

4. Hold down the power button for 30 seconds

5. put everything back in

6. it will turn on fine now

I figured it was worth a shot

and it worked!

can someone explain to me how on earth this worked? was removing the RAM a red herring? what gives?

Klinotaxis

i uh... well here's a similar thing on acer. as it says, i guess it's to drain any lingering charge on capacitors.

removing the ram... could be nothing given that acer doesn't mention it, could be to avoid damage to it from the reset process, could be to make sure it doesn't drain into an inconsistent state? just spitballing

Imipolex G

I've had a couple of situations where a laptop froze and the only way I could get it working again was to unplug and remove the battery. I guess it's a sort of "force kill" thing?

I dunno

glennmagusharvey

this reminds me of the More Magic story

lee4hmz

It sounds like the power management controller got stuck somehow. That used to be a big problem on old 68k and PowerPC Macs (some of the first machines to use them), and PCs got them a bit later when ACPI was introduced.