h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Okay so you might have read this subject title and thought, 'who on earth would build a computer without an off button?', unless you have one yourself, but believe me they exist.

Strictly speaking my computer does have an off button. It's just that it doesn't do anything. It doesn't affect the power supply at all. All it does is the equivilent of pressing Start > Shut Down. Now this is all well and good for beginners or stupid people, who might not realise they have to go through the shut down procedure, and might save a few people from losing their unsaved work. But the problem with the button is that it assumes the operating system (Windows) will always be working. Should the system happen to crash, which believe me me Compaq it frequently does, the button is completely ineffectual. It gets to the stage where the only way to turn the computer off is to pull the plug out.

So build computers with off buttons. Please...

You've managed to bring up a pet peeve of mine in bad design.
Why does MS insist you press the START button to STOP the computer.

Yes. While I'm perfectly happy that the Start button is Just The Way It Is, it's a concept my father still can't get to grips with, and so when I tell him to shut the computer down he just sort of sits there.

I tend to think of it like this: it's the START of the shutdown process. Mine rarely completes this process, and instead freezes on the "please wait for your computer to shut down" screen, which I suspect really means "I give up, do it yourself".

My Dell laptop has a great feature - if you close the lid, the machine goes into suspend mode. If you open the lid, the computer comes out of suspend mode. If the batteries run low it goes from suspend to hibernate..when you plug the charger in it goes back from hibernate to suspended. No off button...
However, when it freezes (all to often as I have beta everything on it) I just eject the battery and it goes into off mode

I know it is stupid of me to say this, but it a computer has no power button how do you ever turn it on? Ahh sorry bad joke...

Most notebooks (and ATX PCs when properly configured) have 'soft' off buttons. Pressing causes the shutdown sequence (or possibly suspend/hibernate - depends on software configuration). However in the event that the shutdown fails (What - never heard of such a thing - not more that 4 or 5 times a week anyway) holding the button for 4 or 5 seconds will usually turn off the power. Try it next time!

My PC has a similar 'soft' off/on button, only if the computer crashes it is useless.

All I have to do is say off and my computer shuts down. IT FEARS ME SO...

Useful! I have no off button on my computer either which i always thought was strange. Very inconvinient too. It regularly freezes so i have to clamber among the wires under the table to find the plug, which is behind the table, and then generally misjudge the height of the table, bang my head, which messes up my completely un-shock proof CD player and gives me a headache! Thinking of other things which dont have off buttons, my 2-year-old sister would benefit from 1 i think! Z xx

I suggest you switch to a Mac; they have 'power' buttons. There's one on the keyboard and one on the computer body. The 'Shut Down' function in the Special menu actually shuts down the computer and so does using the Power Key on the keybaord or the button on the computer.

Actually, I'd suggest switching to a Mac anyway: they're friendly, easy to use and don't feed Mr. Bill regularly.

Fruitbat

That's the problem with the macintosh system. It's supposedly friendly. It isn't. It's just as bad a MS systems when it comes down to it.

I have several reasons for liking Macintosh. With only a few hours of reading, I've managed to amass enough information to fix just about anything that goes wrong with the computer. The Mac will tell you what to do with a simple double-click, without assuming you're a complete and total idiot. I have serious problems with the MS system, beginning with the fact that if you want to restart your system, you have to go to the 'shut down' window. This is totally illogical - somebody looking for a way to restart is not going to go look for the shut-down function! MS is frequently and deliberately incomprehensible - the consequences of layering an icon system onto what is clearly a text-based computer. There's so many hidden files and useless folders that we can't really delete, because we don't know what they're for! Not to mention that we still have Windows 95 installed, which eats Netscape Navigator.

Now, the real reason why I clicked onto this topic is that my employer recently purchased some G3s and G4s. I was lucky enough to get a G4, and have noticed that there is no manual eject button for the Zip drive. There's a little plastic hole covered by a membrane of plastic, but there's no way to reach the little button covered by the panel. This makes no sense to me. More than once I've had to call System Support to manually pop off the panel and eject a screwed up Zip disk that refused to eject. I also dislike the fact that I can no longer push the button to retract the CD holder into the CD drive. Now I have to push on the holder itself like every other yokel - I used to have to reprimand people for doing this, and now the Mac itself is forcing me to contribute to the decay of this device. I can still blame Microsoft, though, because the G3 and G4 was released after they gained a controlling interest in Macintosh. Leave it up to them to find new ways to make things break.

I build my own systems or buy computers from people who still make them the right way, with a hard-wired power button, a cd tray with a button to retract, a flat sided and topped mid-tall tower case, and a Natural keyboard. I like my keyboard much better than I do my regular ones... I can sit back with it on my lap and type in perfet relaxation and maximum comfort... speaking of which...

My computer has a 'standby' button that causes the computer to immediately crash. I read somewhere that some idiot at Hewlett Packard designed the 'standby' function and it has never worked for anybody. Does anybody have a 'standby' button that actually works?

I have found the answer... run ME and than you can hit "any" key to "shutdown" your computer

Re: Having to go to "Start" to shut down, I always thought this was a hangover from the old DOS days of "Press Enter to Exit"...

Oh, btw, Lentilla, most modern CD drives have a piece of soft foam or equivalent as a buffer behind the tray, with a microswitch embedded in it which tells the motors to close the tray as soon as it senses sufficient pressure. It's there to prevent the gears being stripped if, for example, you have your CD ROM drive installed behind one of those stupid little decorative door flaps, and the system tries to eject it while the flap is closed... So, there's absolutely no harm in closing them by pressing the front. They're designed to start running the motor before any significant pressure has been applied to the gears.

On the subject of those flaps, anyone who actually assembles PCs will tell you that they *always* hinge on the wrong side! When the case is open, whichever side you need to access to fit cards etc. onto the motherboard, the flap will always hinge in such a way as to be in the way when you're inserting driver disks.

I assume this standard comes from the same place which decided that the fan in a PSU should blow outwards, thus sucking crap into the case through every orifice and contributing to removable media drives filling with dust. It would be just as efficient to blow it *inwards*, letting the user fit a dust filter over the fan, and creating a positive pressure inside the machine to keep it clean.

Wow, that was a longer rant than I intended... I feel better for that!

On subject of fans... why aren't we using Peltier gates for cooling? can get something like 90 degree differenial with 5 volts... in a device the size of a thumb nail...

Been there, done that. First problem, in a PC environment, is that commercially available Peltier stacks run at either 8v or 8.5v - not easy to achieve with a conventional PC's PSU. At 5V they don't make enough of a difference to be worth the effort, and at 12V the "hot" side desolders itself and shorts out. (Been there, done that too... )

Even when they're working well, they're no substitute for fans - you still have to dissipate the original heat somehow, plus an extra 25W or so from the Peltier device itself.

What I would like to see is modern CPUs being built with a Peltier layer "inside the can". The outer casing would get much hotter, but the core would be substantially cooler, and being sealed inside you wouldn't run the risk of "frosting". (A serious problem with force-cooling chips, where condensation or even ice forms around the processor, picking up impurities from the air and shorting out the bus!)

Forgetting how to turn computers off, does anyone know why my computers keeps spontaneously turning itself on? This happens any time, be it middle of the day, evening, or middle of the night, if there are people in the room or not...

If you're using a serial mouse, and the BIOS is set for "Power on with modem activity", that can do it. Simple warming or cooling of the room can make the mouse ball move by a single pixel, making the BIOS wake the machine up. To fix it, if that is the case, turn that option off in the BIOS.