Keyboard Power-on - is it possible?

[affaaffa]

Hi,

We have a bunch of S20 at the office and they are placed inside a ventilated desk. I want to know if it is possible to set up the BIOS to allow the box to be switched on from the keyboard without asking the staff to duck under their desk, open the cabinet and switch it on manually?

We have other brands of desktops lying around and they can all do keyboard power-on.....

We already have wake form keyboard configured which is great then things are normal. But if for some reason the box will not shutdown or logoff from any number of windows problem they'll need to perform manual restart.... I can see this becoming an OH&S problem one day....

So does anyone know?

[psuturtle Lenovo Staff]

The short answer is no.  Our BIOS is designed to kill power to the USB ports in S5 state (power off).  Leaving power supplied to the USB ports in S5 is not really a common operation as it allows for a high chance of unintended wakeups (or even multiple unintended wakeups).

You could consider looking into a WOL (wake on LAN) scenario or using BIOS event timers to try to wake from S5.  Might be a bit more complicated that what you're looking for though.

[affaaffa]

Thanks for your clarification. I can understand the WOL / event timer for a power management point of view (e.g. wake computers up in the morning).

However I'm after a solution for a hard reset after the system goes unresponsive. I could / will hook up an external switch via the power button jumpers on the mobo [you probably dont want to hear this ]. but I just thought I'd exhaust the official avenues before I do a hack. Thanks.

[psuturtle Lenovo Staff]

Actually for what you're looking for, that's probably your best solution.  Let me know if you need any help on the cable pinouts.

Thanks for this topic though, it's giving me a few ideas to kick around now