You're working on an important document, making great progress -- when suddenly your laptop freezes. The mouse won't move, pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete does nothing, and all the hard work you've done is lost. For some reason, this keeps happening. Virus scanners detect nothing, disk defragmenting didn't work -- your laptop still freezes. The last resort, short of wiping the hard drive clean, is a hard reset. A hard reset will restore certain settings back to factory defaults, which may be enough to fix your problem.
1). Turn off your laptop by clicking "Start" and then "Shutdown." If your laptop is frozen, hold down the "Power" button until it turns off.
2). Remove all devices from your laptop. This includes anything connected to the USB ports and any SD cards. You should be able to unplug anything connected to the USB ports. For SD cards, generally there is a small gray or black button that you have to press to eject the SD card.
3). Unplug your laptop and remove the battery. Battery removal is different on each laptop, but in general you'll need a screwdriver to unscrew the battery compartment before you pull out the battery.
4). Hold down the "Power" button on your laptop for 20 seconds. This will drain all of the extra power still running through the system. If you don't do this, your laptop may not reset properly.
5). Wait about five minutes and then reinsert the battery and reconnect the AC power. Your laptop has now been reset.
