Hi Gang - We’re visiting my mother-in-law, and she thinks I’m a computer genius, but I’m stumped. She has a Dell Windows XP computer, plugged into a power strip along with a bunch of other peripherals. She’d like to be able to just turn on the power strip and have everything turn on. Everything does, except for the PC, which she has to hit the power button seperately to make it turn on. She claims it used to come on with the rest of the stuff when she turned on the power strip, but not anymore.
I’ve tried to find a setting to let it do this, both in the boot menu and in the Control Panel, but nothing looked like it would work. I’ve never known a computer to be able to do this, but she claims it used to. Do any of you know if there is a way to do this? Thanks!
It can be done but not sure if it should. In the old days the pc power switch was a hard switch, like a light switch, so she might have been used to that, now its a soft switch and only shorts two pins, so just adding power to a computer won’t trigger the psu to turn on, it has to get the signal.
But the main thing is there is no reason for her to do this. If she shuts her pc down that way its just harmful, and she doesn’t save any power worth speaking about doing this, or time, she wastes her time in fact. because the power switch is now soft, it triggers the shut down sequence or hibernation/suspend…whatever you set it to, so you can walk away and let it finish itself, which can take a while when installing updates or such.
I never did figure out the exact cause, but once upon a time I had a 486 (Win98?) where I had strange crashing and minor hard disk errors. I was turning it on/off with the power strip. Eventually tried just using the PC power button and the problems went away. I could only assume that turning on the power strip shot a power spike through or something (or a dip in voltage or something). YMMV
Actually, that can be bad. Switching power supplies in computers have big capacitors that draw a significant surge when power is first applied. Things with transformers can sometimes draw big surges when the power is first applied also…depends on relative phasing of line voltage between shutdown and startup. Incandescent bulbs draw much more than rated current when first switched on. Anyway, the switches in power strips are rated for 15A typically, but these surges can be 100A, or even more for half a cycle. That is hard on the switch contacts, because they typically bounce a few times before making solid contact. Not horrible to replace a power strip if they just fail, but I have seen power strips that melted due to the switches developing high resistance.
