Thinkpad internal keyboard connector

Just plug a keyboard into the USB port.

Read it again. How can a USB keyboard power up the system that supplies it power in the first place? Did they work out how to harness magic?

To the OP, I've had this issue with a variety of equipment, and we "cheated" by tracing back the original keyboard/keypad/whatever power lines (broken or not, we could tear it apart to find out).

But because you're asking, I take it you don't have an original keyboard in the first place?

You could get lucky by probing pins and see which ones have some DC present. Would probably be the easiest in the absence of schematics or other info.

I don't know about laptops, but many desktops can do this. There is usually a setting in the BIOS to wake on keyboard. PS/2 and USB keyboards will work.

I have one T41, and one T43. and one keyboard that works in any of them. But I prefer to not have to swap keyboard everytime I need to boot the machine. And I need it to automaticly boot whenever power is applied. This is an bios option in most computers, but obviously not these ones.

Checking for DC is surely a path to find out, but I might aswell break it too by short circuit the wrong wires. Or accidently powering up some sensitive cmos etc.. (why can't they just document these things....)

Here's a picture of the connectors + key:

And, many systems have Ethernet cards which support a "wake on LAN" feature. Send them the correct "magic packet" and they'll initiate a power-on and boot the whole system.

In all of these cases, the system's power supply has some sort of low-power "standby" capability - usually either a trickle feed from the battery (in the case of a laptop) or a separate low-current switching-mode supply (in the case of a desktop or server system). The standby supply keeps a small portion of the hardware powered up even when the system is "off".

The Macintosh II was the first consumer-type computer I know of which had this feature - the onboard battery energized a line in the ADB (keyboard/mouse) bus cable, and the keyboard had a pushswitch to trigger the main power-on feature.

I had a Mac II which was "haunted" - on occasion it would power itself up when there was no one in the room. The problem turned out to be due to some flux residue left on the PC board inside the keyboard, plus the fact that the Mac was left in a cold room overnight. When we opened up the room the next morning, and warm/moist air from the rest of the house flowed into the room, enough condensation would form inside the keyboard to create a current path through the flux residue... and the Mac motherboard detected this tiny trickle of current flow and interpreted it as a push on the "power on" button.

Cleaning the PC-board surface with a defluxer spray, and then coating the traces with some clear nail polish, was sufficient to exorcise the "ghost in the machine".

It's there, but I still like computers to be able to be standalone so to say. Guess it annoys me that I can't control it in the way I like :) I think I will do some measurements.