All options to turn on the PC

What are the most common ways to turn on the computer? And the alternatives? Choose the one that you find most comfortable and useful in your day to day life.

The classic: From the computer itself

The best way to turn on the computer is to do it following the traditional method. That is, we click on the power button and the equipment will start to boot. A button that can vary depending on the brand, the model, the tower, if it is portable or not… The shape and location can vary. But all computers have a button that allows us to turn it on and it will start automatically when we press it. It is also the most common option.

The normal thing is that we follow this method and it does not need any previous configuration or anything more than pressing the physical button that we will find on the laptop or on the tower in case of being a desktop computer. But even if you consider or believe that it is the only one, in the next few paragraphs you will see that there are some alternatives…

Configure the UEFI to turn on the computer

There are two options that we can configure from the UEFI or BIOS of our computer so that we can turn on the equipment in different ways. For example, connecting it to a power strip or simply pressing a key on the keyboard or touching the mouse button.

through a rule

The first option we have is to turn on the computer as soon as the power reaches it. This is very useful to avoid having to press the button on the box, especially if we have it far from the peripherals or in an inaccessible area. With this you can even turn the case upside down and make the rear ports more accessible for plugging in cables. Also, if you have to leave your computer on constantly, it will turn itself back on in the event of a power outage and come back later.

Therefore, this method only works if there is a power outage (having turned off the power strip or button after shutting down the computer from the operating system). If we turn off the computer from the operating system, the computer does not automatically turn on again if there has not been a power cut between when we turned it off and when we want to turn it on again.

In order to activate this option, we go to the UEFI of our computer, normally by pressing the delete key several times as soon as we start the computer and the logo of the manufacturer of our motherboard appears. Once we are in the UEFI menu, we have to look for an option whose name will be similar to Restore on AC / power loss, which in the case of my board is in Advanced – Chipset Configuration. We select the option to put “Power On”, we save the changes, and that’s it.

From a keyboard or mouse key

In the past, you could only do this with a keyboard connected through the PS/2 port. However, for years it has also been possible to do it with any computer and with a USB keyboard or mouse.

To activate this feature, you must activate at least two tabs, or you may even have to activate three. The former is likely enabled by default and should have a name similar to “USB Wake from S3”. This allows a USB device to power on the computer.

The other options we need to turn on are simply USB keyboard/remote power on and USB mouse on, which is found under Advanced – ACPI Settings. To activate them we simply have to click on them and select Enabled, and exit saving the changes. The first option allows you to turn on the computer by pressing any key on your keyboard (it even works with wireless keyboards), while the second allows you to do it with the mouse.

Schedule auto power on

We can program the automatic startup of the computer in Windows 10 through the BIOS. It is one more way to turn on the computer, although not as comfortable as the previous ones. The first thing we must do is enter the BIOS: we restart the computer and repeatedly press the F2, F8, Del key (it will depend on the manufacturer to be one or the other)

Once we are inside the BIOS we can look for the option or section “Power management configuration” and then look for the option “Resume on alarm” or “Turn on RTC alarm”. We simply have to touch the switch next to this option and check “Enabled”. Once we have done this, we can indicate the time at which we want the computer to turn on automatically. We can choose the time but we can also choose a specific date if we only want one day to do it.

From now on, it will always turn on at that time. until we go to the bios again and disable the option. If we want to disable it, for whatever reason, we just have to repeat the previous steps and check “disabled” in the corresponding option.

Wake on LAN: remotely

Wake on LAN is a standard protocol that allows us to turn on the computer without having to physically touch it. We can turn on the computer remotely as long as we have a series of data and a series of requirements are met so that it can be carried out. What this protocol does is “wake up” the computer remotely, as the name suggests. As long as the network card is compatible…

We need to have a motherboard that supports low-power mode and allows wake-up over the network. And, on the other hand, a network card compatible with this protocol that we want to activate. In most cases, modern motherboards are supported but first we need to make sure and look for this feature if we want to use it.

Once we have it, we configure the computer…

• To access the BIOS, you can press DELETE or F1 when booting the system
• Once inside, go to Power Management (although it may vary)
• Here choose Wake-On-Lan (or similar) and activate the option with “Enabled”

And the network card:

• Open Windows Computer Manager
• Go to Device Manager
• Choose your network card from the list of all available
• click on it
• A new popup window will open
• Click on “Advanced Options”
• Go to Activate in Magic Package
• Select “Enabled”
• Click “OK”

We can now start it remotely as long as we know the MAC address and IP address that will be used to activate this protocol and remotely turn on the computer.