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Hacking the power switch on a Dell
gamecreature:
Thanks for all of the suggestions. I'll start by pulling the front off and see what I find. Thanks again.
gamecreature:
Okay, here's what I did:
Pulled off the side and front panel of the case - so far, so good.
Then I had to pull the HD and floppy drive. Finally, I pried off the plastic mount that was holding these in place (this was a bit tricky) There, mounted on the plastic frame was the daughter board.
There were two buttons on the board, one for power, one for reset. Make sure you know which is which, beacuse things can get turned around when moving and removing parts.
There were four terminals soldered to the board, but two are redundant. A little testing with a piece of metal will show you what contacts to use. Then solder your wires (make sure to allow for extra wiring to snake through the chassis), add some quick disconnect terminals on the other side and you have a remote switch for your PC!
MovingTarget:
What I did will probably not be viewed favorably by some but it worked great. I got a HAPP momentary button and mounted on the back right of my CP (you can't see it when you're standing at the front of the machine). I ran a pair of wires down through the cabinet to the computer, they run into the computer case. I soldered alligator clips to the ends of the wire. I stripped just enough of the insulation off of the leads going from the mobo to the power switch so I could clip the alligator clips on there and have a set of the teeth touching the bare wire. This was an HP box whose power switch was also buried like your Dell.
Works great and the power button the front of the computer case still works. Plus when I switch out computers at some point the alligator clips should be easy enough to work into however that case is designed too. Plus if I want to "fix" the old case I'll just slap some electric tape on the wires or hit it with a small amount of liquid electric tape.
Gaston77:
I have a funny story about this actually. I just moved into a new appartment with my girlfriend at the time and didn't have any tools at all. I was so hell-bent on getting the PC out, I lost my reasoning. I didn't care about the PC casing at all -I already decided to dump that anyway- so I went ahead and took an IRON (yes, the one you use for your clothes!) and BURNT out the entire front panel (with the power on/off buttton and the reset button!). Worked like a charm. :dizzy: Don't know what I was thinking...but it was dead funny.
Every motherboard has a set of pins with -usually- 5v connections. It's a simple matter of hooking up the connections to the original switch. If you have a newer board, you needn't even bother. YOu can set is so that it powers up when you press space bar. All this is to be found in the motherboard's documentation.
meany:
My easy solution was to put the computer in the rear of the cabinet with the power button facing the back of the cabinet. I drilled a hole in the cabinet even with the power button. I cut a pencil in half and push the pencil through the hole with the eraser pushing the power button on. Works great. No hacking.