I have an HP Pavilion Elite desktop computer, model HPE-490t. I like it because it didn’t cost too much, boots itself from an SSD, came with 16 GB of RAM, and has 6 CPU cores for editing video and camera RAW images. It has one behavioral quirk that I cannot explain, however. The recent power interruptions here in the Northeast got the machine into a state where it could not be restarted. It would power up for a second or two, shut down, and then power up again, never being able to get to the point of showing anything on the monitor.

• I unplugged it for about 10 seconds and plugged it back in. Same behavior (fails to boot).

• I unplugged it and walked away for an hour, then plugged it back in and it worked perfectly!

I think something similar happened after installing a second hard disk drive into this machine.

So the question is why does the computer behave differently depending on how long it has been unplugged? Where is energy stored that affects the machine’s ability to boot? Capacitors in the power supply? Battery on the motherboard (there is one for the clock, but that wouldn’t be exhausted by being unplugged for an hour, I don’t think)?