WinXP won't detect power switch...

[JeremyR]

Hi

Since I reinstalled XP Home about a month ago, it has failed to detect the ATX power switch. I can't push the button to shutdown/hibernate/whatever and when I do shutdown (from start menu only), it goes to the "it's now safe to turn off your computer" screen. At that point, I can only turn the computer off by holding the power in for the 4 seconds to get the motherboard to kill the power for me.

The fact that I can turn my computer on with it and the 4-second thing proves that the switch and the controller on the motherboard are ok, doesn't it? But how can I get XP to detect the switch?

[cmillar6]

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/shtdwnxp.php

scroll down to towards the bottom to "powerdown issues"

[glc]

Control panel, power options. Look for an APM tab, if you have it, open it and check the box to use advanced power management.

[JeremyR]

Thanks. Looking for the APM tab was the first thing I did when I couldn't get it to shutdown. It's missing. It seems I'm stuck with this save a reinstall but I don't want to do that just to fix an annoyance.

In it's infinite wisdom, Windows installed the non-ACPI version of hal.dll during setup when it should have detected and installed one of the ACPI-aware versions. According to MS (KB309283) this can't be changed without reinstalling Windows (and who's to say it would detect properly next time anyway)

Oh well...

[glc]

Sounds like this is an older machine. If you are sure it installed as a Standard PC instead of an ACPI computer, go into the bios and disable ACPI and make sure APM is enabled.