Thinkpads Forum

I'd like to have my R61 connected to an external display and an external keyboard, and would pretty much like to keep the lid closed at all times. Is there a way I could power up the laptop without having to actually open the lid and press the power on button and without purchasing a dock?

Power on LAN might work by sending a magic packet over the network (ethernet). Power on LAN is a BIOS menu choice. Sorry, I don't know much more about this. Never tried it myself.

Hacking the keyboard or docking port connector would be the other ways to go. If you can figure out how to connect a switch across the existing button on the keyboard or identify the appropriate pins on the docking port, then that should work. I'd assume that docks or port replicators are either hard to come by or expensive in your part of the world, yes? That would be the cleanest solution to your problem.

Wake On Lan used to be one of those things I just couldn't get my head around. I recently found this little free program, though, that makes it a snap:
http://magicpacket.free.fr/

If it is always connected to the accessories you mentioned, I assume it is also always plugged in to AC. So just never power it off. Instead, send it to sleep, and you can wake it up by pressing a key on the keyboard or moving the mouse.

I remember having an HP desktop computer, which I could turn on (and yes, it was completely shut down, not set to sleep) just by pressing the space key. Surely something like that can be done here? Or is it a BIOS only thing?

I used an HP Vectra system that had that feature. Annoying when something accidentally hit the space bar when moving stuff around my desk at work . I believe that this would have to be something designed into the BIOS.

Actually, after fiddling around with something like this on a desktop, I realized that "powering on a keypress from standby" and "powering on a keypress from shutdown" are two different things.

The former indeed requires a special "wakeup" BIOS setting and is annoying, because of the accidental bump into they key that can take place, as Ray mentioned.

The latter can be done by any machine implementing standard ACPI and any ACPI-compliant OS.

However, now that I think about it, Thinkpads may not actually implement standard ACPI, because the only way I know to bring a Thinkpad from standby is by pressing the Fn key, not just _any_ key on the keyboard.

It might work with an external USB keyboard, I need to try that. Or maybe there is some setting to tweak which would allow that.