Toughbook CF-51 turns itself on

Another question since I may get an answer here:

Shortly after I bought it, my CF-51 started to turn itself on randomly. From time to time I would try to use it only to discover that its battery was dead, and eventually, I was able to see it turning itself on. Since it has done this while inside of a backpack in a parked car on a Florida afternoon at least once, I suspect this shortened the life of its hard drive (which is another thread).

I emailed Panasonic at the time and they had no ideas. I couldn't be without the computer long enough to RMA it, so I've dealt with it and the warrantee is now expired.

Here are the basics:

If I suspend, hibernate, or tell it to shut down, there is a decent chance that it will immediately turn itself back on. It has done this many times. Even if not immediate, there is a pretty good chance that it will happen eventually.

This will happen regardless of whether the network is connected, so it is not a wake-on-LAN issue.

The only way to keep it from turning itself back on is this: right after it shuts down, turn it back on, then press and hold the power button until the laptop shuts off again. This solution prevents me from ever using the standby mode, which is annoying.

I'll probably switch to a Mac after this laptop finally gives up the ghost, but until then, does anyone have a clue what I can do about this? Since it is out of warrantee, I am pretty sure I'm stuck, but maybe there's a cure...

 

I'm wondering if this is a software problem. You might try a complete reinstall of the operating system. Have you changed any settings in the Windows Control Panel related to power? I'd go there, and apply standard settings, ie remove the "hibernate" ability(this is known to cause problems with laptops). Change one thing at a time, starting with hibernation, and restart when you're done. Then, check in the BIOS to be sure that "Wake on LAN" is not set, and "Boot on LAN" is disabled. Which OS do you have?

 

I had to swap hard drives because the old one died, so I wasn't able to do a gradual set of changes unfortunately. Since I worked on the laptop, I haven't seen it do this behavior yet, so it may have been one of two things:

1) Reinstalling the operating systems (Windows XP and Fedora Linux)
2) Removing the battery (while I was looking in the wrong place for the hard drive).

If it starts doing it again, I can at least try removing the battery again to see if that cures it. I won't touch the power settings, so if it happens again I can eliminate that possibility.

 

as a last measure after everything has been exhausted, I would do a fresh install. if this still happens after the fresh reinstall, call ghostbuster.