There's something weird with my HP laptop computer. Maybe you've heard of this and maybe you haven't. The screen is supposed to activate when I open it up. It has a weird quirk where every year or so absolutely nothing happened when I lifted the screen portion from the base. The only way to activate it was to open it up (tiny screws the size of a grain of sand), remove the battery, then reconnect it. This wasn't a major problem because it only happened once in a great while. Now it's doing it frequently. It did it yesterday and this morning. The computer is only two or three years old.

    Control, Alt, Delete does nothing. Holding the power button does nothing. The screen and keyboard are stone cold dead until I open the case and disconnect then reconnect the battery.

Does it have an actual power switch ?

Sounds like you've got it set on standby.
You need to change that to hibernate, or just switch it on and off properly.

What frequently happens is the battery runs low, the laptop shuts itself down in standby mode and then gets locked into that state.
So that when you switch it back on it still thinks it's in low power standby.

Unplugging and removing the battery resets that.
Which is why that actually works.
And yeah the current trend for sticking the battery inside the shell is bloody annoying.

Hibernate is a much better option, almost as quick, but with the benefit of shutting the power off and saving battery power.
In standby mode, power us still being used.

You still can get the same issue in hibernate mode, but it's much easier to reset and dies not involve taking the machine apart :-)

If you like I can give you a call and we can set up a remote service for it :-)

I do a lot of work via remote support software these days.

   Thanks much.  Let me try the hibernate setting first.  If that doesn't work I'll take you up on your kind offer. And yes, it does have a power switch on the side but when it's stuck the power switch is useless. 

Edit:  All of the shutdown options were set to sleep which is the same as standby I suppose.  I changed them all to hibernate.  Hopefully that'll help.  Thanks again. 

The truck is to not let the battery run down to the point that it shuts itself off.

If it happens in hibernate mode, you wait till windows starts to boot and then hold the power button down to force it to power off mid start.
Then the next time you start it up you get the option to start windows afresh, without the saved hibernate image.

:-)

    Thanks much.

lol it's a call i get fairly regularly :-)

Probably nice to have CA to ask when you have a computer problem. Seeing as he does this for a living.  ;)

Quite handy and much appreciated.

I think I've been doing it about 30 years now.

The remote support options I've got now are pretty neat.
I've got old customers scattered all other the country who i still support.

So don't be shy.
the odds are I've seen the problem before and never yet not fixed a problem or cleaned a virus off.

Hada  customer last week who was stupid enough to talk to a cold caller.
Eventually he listened to his wife and hung up.
Next time he rebooted there was a little locking utility asking him for a password.
I admit I had to actually engage my brain on that one.
But I've been unblocking longer than they've been blocking and I won :-)