Windows XP wont shut down

[Jimborae]

Ok help needed fast as this is my boss' pc.

Basically when I go to shut down the pc starts to shut down but then goes to a screen that says "its now safe to turn your pc off"

I fixed this bnefore on my pc but can remember how i did.

As always all help much appreciated

Regards

Jim

[Black Hawk]

/me thinks it's something to do with ACPI

Is the power management stuff enabled in the bios? In device manager, what does it say under "Computer"?

[Jimborae]

Hi Black Hawk, that rings bells with me.

In device manager it says Standard PC under Computer, I think it should say somthing like ACPI Enabled PC shouldn't it.

I'll go check the bios now.

Cheers

James

[Thrax]

Standard PC means it has no auto-shutdown function. This is a windows problem.

You can't go from standard PC to ACPI either. It screws the operating system and you get bluescreens on boot as the IRQ table is screwed, amongst several other things.

You'll have to do a repair install, if not a reformat.

[WuGgaRoO]

windows problem ay? are you sure its not sumthing else? When i isntalled winxp on my 450mhz machine i got the same shiznet...isnt it cuz of older bios' not being able to support hat function

[Jimborae]

ACPI is enabled in the bios so where do I go from here.

If I do a repair install wont it just do the same? Also this install of XP was an upgrade of 2000 so that I wouldn't lose all his settings & program installations as he was adamant that he did'nt want to re-install everything.

WuGs, its a fairly old board, PC Chips 810L with an XP1700 I installed in it.

Regards

Jim

[Thrax]

Motherboards as far back as the Pentium II support ACPI.

If it says "Standard PC" in device manager, it's an OS problem (Confirmed by Jim's look at the BIOS).

[croc_]

Yeah, my Shuttle was installed the same way. I don't know why it did that, the installation I had in it before was installed as ACPI uniprocessor (not Standard PC).

Oh well.

[Black Hawk]

If you're gonna do a repair installation then hit F5 while starting the installation process (where it says "Press F6 if you need to install a third-party SCSI or RAID driver") and select "ACPI Uniprocessor".

[Jimborae]

Thanks guys, got it sorted.

As Thrax said it was an OS problem, re-installed the os again but did it from dos and chose repair rather than in windows. Then hit F5 at the appropriate moment and forced it to install the ACPI hal.


Cheers

Jim

[Jimborae]

Black Hawk, beat you to it mate, but thanx anyway. :)

[Spinner]

Yea, it's quite a common problem this, I've faced it a few times. It is most common with motherboards manufactured at a cross over point before Windows XP was released. Some motherboards just don't have it in them to convince XP they are ACPI capable. Big name manufacturers normally released a BIOS update for the boards to resolve the issue, but some where still left with the problem. The only way to get round it is to re-install and force the OS setup to install the correct PC type, like these kind fella's said.

A common, annoying, but ultimately simple problem to fix.

[Geeky1]

Of course, the simplest fix would be to carefully remove the PC Chips board, replace it with something halfway decent, drench the PC Chips board in lighter fluid, and BBQ it.

[Jimborae]

Geeky, you wouldn't be wrong there mate but I'm afraid at the time being its out of the question. He wanted a simple cheap upgrade so it was new CPU and 2nd hand graphics card time.