message "safe to shut down the pc' after shutting down fro..

toakala wrote:
> Just did a clean installation in my old pc (original running win98) with win
> xp. When I shut down the pc, it does not auomatically shut down the power
> supply to pc, a message will appear at the end "safe to shut down the pc.....
> ij which I have to press the button to cut off the power supply. When it was
> running under win98, I do not have this message. So how can I eliminate this
> meaaage? Thanks foryour help

It is probably too late now, but did you see a warning message
about a problem with the ACPI standard of your PC ?

The shutdown of the PC, relies on features of ACPI. The motherboard
of the computer, comes with a BIOS. The BIOS supports ACPI, and there
are several versions of ACPI. Older motherboards may be slightly
non-compliant with the standard, and sometimes the Windows installer
can detect this. (It happened on one of my older PCs. I was
installing Win2K at the time, and the installer noticed the
ACPI of the motherboard was non-compliant.)

First, you check the BIOS, to see whether ACPI version 1 or 2 is
enabled. Then, check in Google, and see if your motherboard is
known to have a broken BIOS ACPI implementation.

To see what happened, after the installation is completed, go to
Device Manager, and look at the "Computer" entry near the top.
For example, if I click the (+) by "Computer", it says
"ACPI Multiprocessor PC". My computer shuts down properly, without
me having to manual switch it off via the button on the
front of the computer.

If the installation did not do an ACPI based install, the
computer entry will say "Standard PC". And that would likely
require you to press the button on the front of the computer,
to shut it off after a shutdown.

So at least post and tell us, what make and model of computer
this is. If you built the computer yourself, using retail parts,
then indicate the make and model of the motherboard.

Once you get ACPI enabled, and the Suspend to RAM setting in
the BIOS set up correctly, you can try installing WinXP again.

During the install, you can press F5 and specify the HAL
(Hardware Abstraction Layer) to use. You cannot force ACPI,
if the hardware is not compliant, but you can push the install
in the other direction (towards the less useful "Standard PC").
So there is a facility to make a decision about the HAL. If
you didn't do anything, the installer should try to install
an ACPI type, if it looks like the hardware supports it.

"How to force a Hardware Abstraction Layer during an
upgrade or an installation of Windows XP"

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299340

The standard before ACPI, was called APM. It relied more on
functions in the BIOS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Power_Management

http://www.linux-sxs.org/bedtime/apmacpi.html

Paul