Yes, this is not an uncommon technique for doing a "true hard reset" on electronics that are normally "soft-off". The idea is that pressing the button will cause it to try to turn on if there's still some charge left, which then drains the charge away quickly.

My really old Lenovo Thinkpad started insisting to reboot after shutdown a while ago, and after a hard drop that left the battery dislodged, it froze after being powered on.

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.

That's precisely what was described, wasn't it?

"I asked the guy what the power button pushing incantation did and he said “static discharge” so apparently there was some sort of static that caused a short or something."

Not really, no

So the tech (or the person writing this up) mixed up "static" and "flea power"[1].

I believe the idea of "draining charge that shouldn't be there" has been properly conveyed nevertheless.

[1] https://en.everybodywiki.com/Flea_Power

It's difficult to imagine how the underlying fault here is anything other than a latch-up[1] event, likely manifesting on a upstream controller/supervisory chip in the power distribution chain.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latch-up

I have, in several decades of operating and servicing computers and other electronic equipment, never heard of the term "flea power". According to that article it seems to have originated in a Dell service manual, which erroneously calls it "static electricity".

So what do you call it?

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.

I've always referred to it as "residual" power/charge.

Is it incorrect to call it static electricity, though.

I mean... it's charge at rest... so electric and static, but in that same sense, there's static electricity in batteries, and static electricity in DRAM (in-between refresh cycles), and any oscillator at the moment when the first time-derivative of charge reaches zero.

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.

Is it really, though -- isn't what happens inside capacitors basically the same thing as we call "static electricity" when it happens between other surfaces? Or, IOW, isn't pretty much anything potentially (Heh!) a capacitor, only pretty much all things except the ones purpose-built as such are really bad capacitors?

The article makes it sound like it's a secret code like a Konami code that the laptop will recognize, but it's not the case.