Power On alternatives on R51s?

[dkreidler]

We're currently installing R51's as desktop machines, with usb mice & keyboards, flatscreen monitors, etc. Does anyone know of any way to power up the R51 without having to open the lid?? I'd like to avoid having to buy a dock just to get an external power button! The external usb keyboard has a power button, but it only works for shutdown. Clearly there is no juice going out the usb port for that button to be able to function as a power on... any ideas? I'm kinda stumped.

dk
http://www.regis-nyc.org

[Patsoe]

I don't have an R51, but my desktop PC has a BIOS setting to come back from suspend by keyboard button. Maybe that's possible on the R51?

[dkreidler]

It does, but I'm not worried about coming back from stand-by. I mean Power Off, Shutdown type situations. These are admins with monitors on top of the closed laptop, with external keyboards, etc. What's weird is, the keyboards we got for them, Adesso USB keyboards, do have a 'Power' button, but it only works for powering down!! We had to reprogram the laptops to recognize that button as the 'Standby' button, since the ingenious designers put it right next to the 'Delete' key!

Any further ideas would be much appreciated.

dk
http://www.regis-nyc.org

[jon]

Some lame ideas...

You could set the timer in the BIOS to wake up the computers at a certain time each day, say before people get to the office.
Or if they're all wired, you could enable Wake on LAN in the BIOS and send them all a wake-up packet.

Not very good solutions though. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any wake up on USB/PS-2 device options in the BIOS so I'm not sure how else it could be done.

The other option is to not switch them off - won't do any harm except draw power.