When I was younger I had a computer where the front fell off and stripped the wires from the button.
To turn it on and off I had to hold the wires together, felt like I was hot wiring a car every time.
Wasn’t this built so the front wouldn’t fall off?
Well, Its not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
We’ve towed it outside of the environment.
When I bench tested components at a PC shop, I’d use my smallest screwdriver to short the pins on the motherboard to start up the caseless computer.
Kinda the same here but one day I noticed it also worked by simply touching the case with one of the wires and that’s how I did it from here.
I have a server that’s a motherboard in a shelf that I stick a screwdriver into to power cycle
As it was the style at that time
As was*
It’s also how we accidentally shut them down before saving our work
Now that’s my cat’s job. Never again will I buy a case with a top mounted power button.
You could install a second power switch inline with the first. If both are momentary contact then you’d have to press both at the same time to turn it on(or hold one, etc).
I’ve never actually needed on of these but they keep showing up in movies/games…so I’d vote this. Toggle it on then press the normal button. You could leave it on to keep the regular button working or toggle it off and disable it.
I’ve never actually needed on of these but they keep showing up in movies/games…so I’d vote this
Sounds like you need a small electrical project then!
For a very long time it’s been possible to set what the button is doing and it’d only cause a hard shut down if you hold it down for like 5 seconds.
I’ve had that issue in several ways. Of course what you said, had an extension cord with a switch below my desk and I kept accidentally hitting that switch in the same way, lived in an apartment some years ago that had some shitty electrical work done by the previous tenant and if I had enough lamps on while my computer and screen where on and I tried to plug in my phone or turn the TV on the circuit popped, and most recently I’ve been playing games via cloud streaming (Shadow) and my Ethernet cable has lost the security tab thingy on both ends and I keep accidentally moving other cables so they touch the Ethernet cable and it falls out. Most of the time I can just put it back in an reconnect to the cloud computer but sometimes it just refuses to do that so the cloud computer shuts down before I’m able to get it working. Lost several hours of progress in various games throughout the past couple of years, but I never buy anything new unless it’s absolutely needed so I just live with and accept it '^^
Kids these days with their 5% overclocks.
Back in my day we had 100% overclocks!
You might have meant it as a joke but just in case someone else isn’t aware, this button actually made your CPU slower 🤓
Depends on the motherboard version. On later ones, the turbo actually worked to make your PC faster.
As far as I understand, it’s purely marketing semantics.
The point of the ‘Turbo’ button is to slow the CPU down to provide compatibility with old software that was written with a fixed clockspeed, where the software would become unusably fast on newer CPUs.
Calling this a “slow” mode or “compatibility” mode wasn’t very marketing-sexy however, so manufacturers just flipped it around and called the normal speed ‘Turbo’.
With later systems, developers all became aware that varying CPU frequencies were a thing, and started to base their software timings on the realtime clock instead.
So in later systems there was no longer any need to have the CPU run at anything other than its maximum (normal) speed - and the turbo button simply went away.
…we had finally achieved permanent turbo.
“We called it Purbo. It didn’t catch on.”
You might have meant it as a joke
Yeah, I didn’t think anyone would get the joke if I posted a picture of a 486DX with the J20 jumper set. You have to be a greybeard to remember that.
My first thought was “hey I’m not a greybeard”
I am. I am a greybeard.
A 486DX with the J20 jumper set! HAH!
This brings out nostalgia…
I still do, why should it have changed?
Button is on the top now 😔
And too small for my big ass toe
More people use laptops (or even tablets or smartphones) more of the time nowadays, so fewer people turn on their devices that way nowadays.
I still use my toes for my laptop but the people in my office are so weird about it
ctl-alt-defeet
I guess that’s why they call it “booting”
mine was an actual heavy-ass switch. it felt like shutting down the power of an entire neighborhood.
And a turbo button
Yeah mine had switches on it to power all the peripherals too, and they lit up bright orange.
Made you feel something killing your pc.
That sounds so cool
I remember Macintosh computers from circa 1990. Even then Apple loved to just remove buttons because they hate buttons. Because it was so perfectly intuitive to drag a disc icon over to the fucking trash can icon in order to eject the floppy disc, they didn’t have a physical eject button for the floppy drive. Helpfully, they instead put the power button right where a floppy drive eject button should have been. So I was constantly turning the computer off whenever I wanted to eject a disc.
They did put the power button on the keyboard though, which was pretty awesome
I remember those keyboards, if I hit that button my PC just hard crashed. Fantastic.
I set up Linux on a laptop with a particularly aggressive keyboard power button recently. I’d be at the terminal go to hit backspace and where Linux?
I can still hear/feel the gradual effect followed with the iconic “click”
And all the loud noises of the giant components used to be in such PCs 🤭
Still do.
Its a matter of principle.
I still do it bro
Yeah, that’s how I do it every morning.
Sometimes, when the ol’ 'puter is cranky, I have to press the reset button, which is really small, and it’s difficult to hit it with my toe (I have to do some tricky nail work, not for beginners), but I’ll be damned if I ever reach down and use my fingers.
mine had a button cap and dad used to joke that he bought it on black market and it originates from the nuclear missile launch button.
That button cap is important with a lot of kids around.
makes sense. never thought about that from this standpoint. I had a tendency of pushing random buttons when I was a kid so that’s probably why the cap.
Has something changed?
Smaller power buttons and often on top rather than in front. Also feel like hard and clicky is more popular than soft and linear now
The real off-button is usually down at the back, on the PSU.
switch, not button
You are technically correct, the best form of correct.
I still do it lol.
I don’t get it why though. The one on mine feels very cheap, specially with it having a fulcrum on one side, making it not go down straight, while using the design language of something that would go down straight.
In 2025 I don’t turn off the computer.
