Bear with me a minute while I explain why I want to know about the hardware and BIOS resets....

I ran into an odd problem on my notebook where it would no longer play audio from the left internal speaker. Windows settings and drivers were fine. 

I opened the laptop to perform some testing. Reseated speaker and still no go. Took a scope to look at output and saw no visible signal at the connector where speaker plugs in. I wanted to see if there is a short so I disconnected battery and found that both left and right speaker connectors showed same resistance when speakers are unplugged and the physical speakers showed same resistance. So, no obvious short. Since that was as far as I could take it I plugged the battery back in and put the cover back on.

I powered up Windows and immediately found sound was working again. It's now been working flawlessly for the better part of a day. It seems like maybe pulling the battery power effectively performed a reset and that solved the issue.

Thus, the question: Is there a way for me to perform a hardware reset on this laptop WITHOUT having to remove the cover.

On a related note, there have been occasions (rare) where on a desktop PC I had to perform a "clear CMOS" operation. On a desktop board there is typically a jumper to do this. Purely for my reference, is there a way of doing this on the laptop, preferably without opening it?

Thanks!