Yes, it was a Dell. Ok, then I feel better. I thought that my troubleshooting skills had gone obsolete.

>It is a hard reset of some Dell systems. One of my pcs at home is a Dell.
>
>
>>That was some of the strange part; they had already unplugged all cords from the PC before holding the power button down. I had already disconnected all the devices, waited a few minutes, then reconnected them, but it never ocurred to me to hold the power button while everything was unplugged. Have you heard of this before?
>>
>>>As far as I know, that ensures that all attached devices power down.
>>>
>>>
>>>>I was helping someone with a PC problem. It would not boot up, or did so sporadically. It was making the beep-beep sound, that has almost always meant a hard drive crash to me. I had to leave, but asked them to call Dell customer support and the solution was to unplug all the cords from the PC, wait about 2 minutes, then hold the PC power button in for about 30 seconds. This fixed the problem. Is this a capacitor-type problem? I've never heard of a solution like this before.