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.
mine was an actual heavy-ass switch. it felt like shutting down the power of an entire neighborhood.
Yeah mine had switches on it to power all the peripherals too, and they lit up bright orange.
Hey man, as long as it’s consensual…
I did that till my i used my desktop till 2019
Nine times out of ten I’d hit the turbo button and then spend half an hour wondering why the family computer was running slowly…
It’s still the 2000’s so I still do
This brings back memories. I’d turn on my big ass HP with my foot and its bright blue LED power button would light up the room.
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.
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.
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.
Mine had the power button too high, so I would accidentally turn it off with my knee
Still do.
Its a matter of principle.
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.
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.
Wasn’t this built so the front wouldn’t fall off?
Well, Its not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
Well how is it untypical?
We’ve towed it outside of the environment.
Perfect prelude to playing GTA
I have a server that’s a motherboard in a shelf that I stick a screwdriver into to power cycle
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.
As it was the style at that time
As was*
It’s also how we accidentally shut them down before saving our work
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.
Now that’s my cat’s job. Never again will I buy a case with a top mounted power button.
She knows the power she holds.
I had to disconnect power button from mobo because my room mate’s cat would just shut it off, luckily I had a case whose side panel was very easy to open with a hinge, so I tied two cables near the latch and to turn it in, I’d turn the latch open the case, quickly short the cables and close the panel and latch.
Thanks for reminding me of that. Also I swear that cat knew what I did and kept trying to open the latch for a few months before giving up.
Same with me but I have a toddler. Windows has a power button setting that I switched to do nothing when pressed.
I was on Linux mint XFCE at that time and even though it had a setting to decide what to do when power button is pressed but it was broken and would reset itself every few hours.
I almost did, but instead connected one pin from the reset button and one from the power button to the power header, then bridged the other two connectors making it so I have to push both to fire it up. Easy for me to operate, and he’s still not figured it out haha.
That is genius, I wish I was that smart.
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 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 '^^
And also how you sometimes accidentally turned it off in the middle of an intense Quake 3 session.
