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Comment by Szpadel | Hacker News Reader

I have at least 2 regular cases where full power off was required to resolve the issue.

First one is dell latitude laptop with fingerprint reader, randomly after few days of operation, fingerprint reader stops responding and login screens freeze for a minute until it timeouts few times. reboot does not solve it, nor suspending machine. it needs to be powered off and on again (hibernation to disk also works).

second case is my pc with ASRock creator x570, after long time if keeping it suspended, WiFi card stopped to function and just throwed some errors in dmesg on driver initialization. here even power off and on did not help, but flipping switch on power supply for few second resolved the issue

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I’ve actually had some strange anomalies happen like this on a couple laptops I have. Rebooting or even holding the power button long enough to do according to the manufacturer some kind of CMOS or hard reset didn’t work either. I had to open up the bottom, cover unplugged, the battery completely Then re-plugged in and everything went back to operational condition.

The WiFi/Bluetooth one was common on AM4, I think, I also had that issue.

The integrated wifi/bt on my AM5 board was so bad I had to disable it and use a PCIe card.

For obvious reasons AMD boards don’t tend to ship with Intel wifi, but in my experience anything else sucks. The intel 6e cards are amazing and dirt cheap.

I’ve had some weirdness with Intel WiFi cards over the years too, especially when dual booting.

Was it the 9560 by chance? (The original AC / wifi5 one) Those were terrible. Our house isn’t practical to wire, so I had a lot of them. All swapped to AX210 cards (6E) and those work phenomenally.

I also dual boot, in addition to being an incurable distro hopper, and these AX210 cards worked out of the box in basically everything.

Yeah I’ve got a Lenovo Legion laptop that I dual-boot Windows and Linux. I haven’t tried in a while but for at least a year it was impossible to soft-reboot to switch OSes if you wanted wifi to work. My best theory was that Windows and Linux had different firmware that they loaded into it at boot and they weren’t reloading that after a soft reboot (just using whatever was already running on the card).

> For obvious reasons AMD boards don’t tend to ship with Intel wifi, but in my experience anything else sucks.

Cause realtek checks the box for has wifi and costs probably $3 less? If you care, you can swap it, and if you don't, you don't.

> For obvious reasons AMD boards don’t tend to ship with Intel wifi

Funnily enough, the threadripper (at least WRX90, and at least asrock) come with an Intel dual 10Gb LAN card. Probably because none of the alternatives are good enough for a pro board.

My friend had an issue with a laptop that did not resolve until the battery was fully drained.

Wouldn't the quicker solution be disconnecting the battery for 2 seconds?

Not everyone has the skills or knowledge to disassemble their laptop. I haven’t had a removable easily replaceable battery since I feel 2006ish. My current one requires 8 security screws on the bottom, a bracket removed, and even I had some issues when I did a swap earlier this year.

This reminded me issue that I had once in one of dell laptops at work. It frozen somewhere deep enough that power button was not even responsive. I remember that I had full battery, display was off and fans were spinning on lowest speed. I figured out that I needed to pull out the battery because waiting until it drains would take ages.

I had to do this secretly because company warranty/service deal would require it to send to dell/request technician

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