PC powers itself on

[drjones]

I was called to one of my attorney's offices the other day to fix a very strange issue. I fixed it and thought I'd post about it here, in case it can help anyone else.

My client has a fairly nice, new Dell Optiplex 960 small form factor PC that would actually power itself back up after shutting down; I would shut down the machine, it would completely power down, fans stop, everything, and then after about 4 seconds would actually boot itself back up.

Dell's support forum suggested a faulty hard drive could cause this - this is definitely a hardware issue and not software - but also as suggested on the forum, I removed the CMOS battery for about a minute, reinstalled it, and that fixed the problem completely.

Upon resetting the BIOS in this manner, I did receive a message upon boot that "The system management hardware requires a reset. System setup configuration and the date/time require attention after the reset."

I did need to manually set the date/time in the BIOS, otherwise I hit "F1" to continue and this message stopped after a subsequent reboot and the system seems back to normal.

Hope this is helpful to anyone else....

 

[wefixit]

There are so many stuff in modern pcs that can wake them up it sometimes gets really nasty to find out what exactly does this.

A couple of months ago I spent one whole working day to figure out what the hell was waking up my own pc which I had recently built that was waking up from sleep and hibernation only.

I had found a really good guide back then for this kind of troubleshooting methodology which will post here in case it helps someone.

vistax64[dot]com/tutorials/63567-power-options-sleep-mode-problems.html

although the guide is for vista/7 it's also applicable for win 8 and probably 8.1 (I've used it on 8)

PS: Sorry about the chopped link, I'm still young to post urls

 

[cypress]

I was called to one of my attorney's offices the other day to fix a very strange issue. I fixed it and thought I'd post about it here, in case it can help anyone else.

My client has a fairly nice, new Dell Optiplex 960 small form factor PC that would actually power itself back up after shutting down; I would shut down the machine, it would completely power down, fans stop, everything, and then after about 4 seconds would actually boot itself back up.

Dell's support forum suggested a faulty hard drive could cause this - this is definitely a hardware issue and not software - but also as suggested on the forum, I removed the CMOS battery for about a minute, reinstalled it, and that fixed the problem completely.

Upon resetting the BIOS in this manner, I did receive a message upon boot that "The system management hardware requires a reset. System setup configuration and the date/time require attention after the reset."

I did need to manually set the date/time in the BIOS, otherwise I hit "F1" to continue and this message stopped after a subsequent reboot and the system seems back to normal.

Hope this is helpful to anyone else....

Quite an interesting problem there lol. Thank you for the solution.