2 position motherboard switch function?

Snake Guy

Honorable
Mar 18, 2013
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I was cleaning dust out of an old laptop and decided to re-do the thermal paste as well. It had never been done and machine was running hot.
Toshiba satellite A25-S307, yes, old.

I ran the computer and cleaned up files, ran defrag, shut down. Pulled the fan, and the heat sink released without much trouble. The original paste was still pliable and mostly wiped off with paper towel and light pressure. Liberally applied at the factory, there was a small wall framing all 4 sides on the heat sink surface. I popped the processor and cleaned it up. Reassembled with a bb or so of new paste in the center.

After that, the computer would not boot. Front panel lights showed power when I plugged in. Yellow battery light. (charging) I took it apart and checked everything. Nice spread on the thermal paste. No bent pins, proper alignment of processor, fan plugged in. I noticed a switch that is underneath the fan on the motherboard. I will attach pics. It is a 2 position slider that says "other" at one end, and "3.0G" at the other end, printed on the motherboard. There is some more writing alongside the switch.
It is possible that i moved this accidentally when fiddling and cleaning. What does it do?

Anyway, there's more. After several back and forths, I tried pushing some other keys and the machine started booting. Esc key does it. That key is normally used to access bios for this machine. Hold Esc during boot, then press F1 for bios screen.

Now, the power button does nothing, but Esc starts the boot cycle. Last boot priority setting was CD-LAN-HDD-FD. I tried accessing bios to check things and sometimes I could get to the bios screen, but it would disappear and proceed to boot. I tried a few bootable CD's but the machine would bypass them and boot from the HDD despite the boot priority setting. It will boot to the desktop and seems fine. I am puzzled by the power switch. I did manage to make it stop on the bios screen, and my settings have not changed. But it will not boot from a CD. Any ideas?

UPDATE:
Strange, I tried some other keys and found that Esc, Ctrl, and Enter all initiated the boot process. The power key still did nothing.
During the boot, it was very inconsistent. The splash (Toshiba logo) screen would sometimes cycle repeatedly. Sometimes it would move on to the hardware problem screen and offer me boot options. I managed to boot into safe mode, or last known good, or boot normally-- all worked sometimes and once on the desktop, everything was normal. I even did a system restore to a point made yesterday, but this had no affect on the issue. There was also a loud "static" noise from the speakers when it started or stopped, just a quick "snap" that I never heard before.

At one point I was checking all the keys to see which ones would start the boot, and I unplugged the power during a boot cycle instead of waiting for the whole process to get to the desktop... After that, none of the keyboard keys would initiate the boot. So I tried the power button, and it worked! Weird. It seems to be working now. And the static sound does not occur.

I would still love to know what the switch in these pictures does. Thanks!

UPDATE 2/6/2015
Regarding that switch, I got an answer from another post:
"This is to set the processor speed, Other = speed is set in the BIOS and 3.0G forces the processor to run at 3 GHZ regardless of the BIOS setting."
Any thoughts on this?
Thanks!

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