I was under the impression that pressing the power button while unplugged was to discharge any electricity left in capacitors, to make sure everything was completely depowered
I had to force it to power off, but that apparently broke it, it won't light up the screen and respond to inputs despite blowing the fan. I disassembled the screen and replugged the data cable, pressed power button in various ways to no avail.
I was about to give up before reading a forum post describing a similar laptop, and emptyed the RAM slots and found it beeped when powered up, so the CPU is OK.
I then unplugged the battery and CMOS battery and pressed power button for a while, put RAMs and batteries back on, and it just revived.
Removing RAMs made the difference, it's done if RAMs were soldered on.
It happened again a few days ago after it was left with no power, and I had to do those thing again, otherwise it has no issues. I think the CMOS battery is probably dead.
Not really, no
I believe the idea of "draining charge that shouldn't be there" has been properly conveyed nevertheless.
I submit that a definition of static electricity as "charge at rest at non-ground potential" is so broad as to exist in any non-trivial circuit and many trivial circuits. Such a definition is therefore less useful than more common notion as electricity generated as a result of physical surface interactions of dissimilar materials.
Calling it "static electricity" is likely to cause reasonably intelligent and well-educated people to conclude it's related to wearing wool socks in Winter while being insufficiently grounded, as opposed to charge being there as a result of normal circuit operation.
Looks like there's no standard term that everyone uses; I'd say it's entirely forgivable that the tech called it "static" for lack of a better word.
The description of this "flea power" reads like some cargo cult narrative that summarily conflates a handful of disjoint electrical characteristics/phenomena. It's like the modus operandi of interwebs consumerism.