Draining Residual Current

Has anyone ever heard of this? Being a new Averatec owner, I wonder if it's something which affects them like it did my old Compaq Presario.

With that computer, I experienced serious sluggishness after a month or two of owning it, so after trying everything usual, I called Compaq support. Straight away, the guy told me to try the following:

Ditatch the power cord and the battery from the notebook. With the notebook switched off, press and holf down the "on" button for up to 2 minutes.

He said that excess current builds up on the circuits after time which can affect the processor and that this was a way to drain it. I was 100% suspcious at first, but after rebooting I found that the speed issue had been solved entirely and that my notebook ran as quickly as it did when I first got it. I had never heard of anything like this before.

I've mentioned it on forums in the past and have always got "pooh-poohed" by people claiming to be "experts". And yes, it sounds like a crazy thing to have to do, but I tested it time and time again on my Compaq and the programs that slowed down (like the cursor on my guitar tabulature program) were always restored to their normal speed after the draining. Web page scrolling was another one to suffer and be fixed.

So anyway, I haven't had my Averatec long enough to know if it does the same thing - so anyone else have any views? Maybe it's something to try if you've suffered any performance issues.

 

If its locked, yes I have heard of doing that. But not to speed the unit up. Sounds like you need to delete your temp file and off line contents also and your cookies. To make that speed difference. That has nothing to do with that speed issues you're having with that Compaq notebook. Yes I am an expert and know that would not effect the speed on the unit after that power drain of the board.

 

So far so good.

 

I've had the same issue with my compaq before. The touchpad became erratic, like if it was a quarter of the FPS it would normally do. That would happen after some kind of blue screen or bizzare behavior. I even attempted a system restore, but no go, the cursor would never be fixed. But once I stepped on this manipulation, that fixed the problem I had with my cursor.

After a while, the same compaq laptop refused to boot, it was powering up, but no POST, no BIOS, no BOOT. The same manipulation brought back everything in place.

I believe doing this resets some compoments that are usually not reseted when you have the battery or AC in.

I even suggested this to somebody in another forum, for another brand, can't remember which brand, but that fixed his problem. He was unable to boot.

 

If I had to guess, I would say that you are draining the small voltage that normally maintains the bios when power is off. this probably resets it back to the factory defaults. Rex.

 

Vedo, I tested this method on many occasions, and it has nothing to do with deleting temp files or cookies. Web pages would begin to scroll sluggishly, and certain programs that I use a lot would begin to slow down to a crawl. Like I said, one example was the "Guitar Pro" tabulature editor - the cursor would slow to the point where there was a 1 second gap between pressing "left" and it actually moving. Doing the draining operation (and nothing else) would fix the problem immediately, so I know for sure it makes a difference.

 

It really depends on what the power switch is connected to.

If I want to completely drain the power of any electronic product, and this goes for anything...shut it down, remove the batteries, take a decent sized resistor (any where from a few hundreds k to a few meg ohms) and short where the battery was and where the AC connects.

DO NOT USE A BARE WIRE. I cannot stress that hard enough. Too little resistance and you can introduce not only arcing but all other sorts of odd transients in your system and too much, of course, you won't drain out remaining power with any certainty. A good design, most modern ones anyhow,will have transient and overcurrent protection, so the arcing isn't as much of a worry as it used to be...but you never know where bad or an overoptimized design will turn up, especially in cheap consumer electronics so it's best to err on the side of caution...

Depending on whether they use a battery to hold the bios settings or an ultra cap, and this is only if they're stupid enough to allow that circuit to dran back to the batter (I don't know why they would)the worst thing that would happen is you lose your bios and clock settings...defaults are in ROM so people don't totally brick their systems...

I don't think that this solution would work with most modern notebooks...it actually osunds like some sort of design flaw or something else specific to that notebook, line of notebooks, or all from that mfr at that time, to be honest. touchpads are capacative sensors, but that should really have nothing to do with it. MOre than likely, it sounds like it could have been a bios bug where compensation or training/calibration data for the poll rate of the pointing device was somehow miscommunicated to windows or otherwise degrading in some way and holding the button down cleared something from NVRAM, maybe just that, or maybe a group of stored data...who knows? There's a lot of stuff going on under the hood to make the magic happen...all sorts of modeling and compensative stuff to make sure that your system keeps working as expected evern when conditions change around it...I've seen some weird crap in my 10 years of being a technician supporting engineering groups...

The more I learn, the more I am amazed that ANY of this stuff works at all.