Brian Vogel wrote:

On my Lenovo, you can hold the power button down for 20 seconds, and it clears all memory registries.
-A hard restart with the power button is possible on any machine.  It's built into how Windows itself works with the actual power switching.

Not just Windows. However, the five second hold of the power button to forcefully power down, is not what he is talking about, if that's what you mean.

I believe he is talking about the hardware reset mode of some laptops, wherein holding the power button for, in his case, 20 seconds, resets various hardware tracking parameters such as battery cycle length.

That was not the kind of reset that should have been effective (or remotely necessary) for his problem, however--this was pretty clearly a Windows issue, that a simple restart should have handled.

Apparently, Lenovo uses 20 seconds for this. Dell is 30 seconds, and I believe HP is 40.
Usually you have to have it unplugged for this to work.

It is most commonly used when the laptop thinks the battery is dead but it isn't, because the charge register has gotten out of sync with the firmware. There are other "invisible" BIOS flags that are reset by this as well, but mostly it's used to solve battery/won't power up problems.

Luke