Quoted from jadziedzic:The whole idea of needing a "reset switch" is lame. And obviously this start failure is not as rare as the great one believes if it happened to a couple of people within the last week or so. Someone - likely a kid - turns on the switch, nothing happens (computer is booting), and then they turn the switch off (and maybe on) as an instinctive reaction.
Someone at JJP should develop a watchdog board that whacks the CPU on the side of the head with a 2x4 - I mean, electronically presses the "reset switch" - if the mobo doesn't start running within a few seconds after power on.
a watchdog won't work on modern motherboards because they contain a built in voltage cutoff failsafe. Msi, Asus, etc.. Introduced it about 18 months ago to deal with power loss.
The reason this occurs is because the owner flips the power off/on in rapid succession. The failsafe in the motherboard treats this as a potential spike and doesn't honor the last power state. This ensures that no devices downstream of the mobo plugged into powered ports ( USB ) don't get destroyed in a surge. This is in direct response to mainstream complains about folks phones and other devices getting destroyed by surges. And before anyone asks this is a hardware interrupt. Not something that can be changed at a bios level.
Go check out the inside of any new arcade game that's pc based. All have a reset switch for this same reason.