First off, I have searched through the forums and I know there have been several posts with similar problems. But after following the good advice that helped out many others, I am still faced with the following dilemma: My computer will not power down or restart after clicking on the "Turn Off" or "Restart" buttons in XP. When I click the "Turn Off" button, XP properly shuts down, my monitor loses its signal (as expected), but my fans, HDDs and power supply are still running. Similarly, when I hit the "Restart" button, the same things happen, but the computer does not reboot. This problem has been occurring ever since I put the machine together. Relevant Components: AMD Athlon X2 3800+ (65W) processor Gigabyte M55SLI-S4 (rev 1.0) motherboard Gigabyte 7300LE video card Thermaltake W0093RU 500W power supply G.Skill 2x1GB DDR2 800 dual channel memory Seagate 2x320GB SATAII HDD (RAID 0) From other posters' advice, the following is what I have checked or tried to fix this. BIOS: I flashed my BIOS two days ago with the latest version, but there is still no ACPI or APM "Enable" setting under the Power Management Setup menu. I have the "ACPI Suspend Type" set to S1 (other option is S3), and the "Soft-Off by Power button" set to Instant-off (as opposed to Delay 4 Sec). Further, the PnP menu only lists PCI IRQ assignments. There is no item in this menu relating to ACPI. Control Panel - Power Options: There is no APM or ACPI tab. There is also no option to enable this feature in the tabs that are visible. Device Manager: Under "Computer", ACPI Multiprocessor PC is listed with a driver date of 7/1/01, but the Uninstall feature is not available. Reinstalling XP: I installed a fresh copy of XP onto another partition, hoping that a clean install with no other software would solve the problem, but it did not. The Power Options window still did not have an APM or ACPI tab. Yes, this is a long post, but I wanted to provide as much info as I could about the problem and what things I have already tried to solve it. Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, sakline345

It sounds like you don't have the chipset drivers for your mboard loaded, and the mboard is going into Standby mode rather than shutting down or restarting properly. Whenever you load Windows from scratch the first time, or whenever you re-load Windows from scratch, you must load the drivers for your mboard chipset after Setup has finished so that Windows has all the proper information about the chipset capabilities on your mboard, including its ACPI/APM support. Windows often does not get that 100% right on it's own, especially if the mboard was made after XP was first released. After you do that, the mboard should Turn Off, Restart, and go into/out of Standby properly when you select Standby. ..... Flashing the bios is not a cure-all. You are taking a big risk when you flash your bios - if the flash fails, and/or the flash chip physically fails while flashing (this is COMMON - these cheap flash chips can only be flashed an unpredictable small number of times), you will have a mboard that will not boot after you flash. You don't take the un-necessary risk of flashing the bios unless you find specific information in bios update release notes or similar for the bios update or other bios updates that are newer than the bios version you have that flashing the bios will cure the problem you are having. Since you have flashed the bios, you must make sure the contents of the cmos part of the bios - the part you can see in the bios Setup pages - is for the new bios version. Some flash procedures will automatically or have you manually load bios defaults during or after the flash procedure so that the cmos settings are those for the new bios version, some will not and what you see in the cmos is a mixture of settings for the old and new bios versions. To make sure what you see in the cmos are the settings for the new bios version, you must load bios defaults after flashing the bios. In any case, since you've been fiddling with bios settings and they may no longer be set to defaults, it is good idea for you to load bios defaults in any case. ...... You don't normally have to fiddle with any settings in your bios or in Windows to get your ACPI/APM features to work properly once you have loaded the proper drivers for your mboard chipset. I have only one computer with XP Pro SP1 on it to examine - it has no ACPI or APM tab in Control Panel - Power Management, but it does have one for Hibernate, where you can enable/disable it.

Thank you for your reply, Tubesandwires. In my original post, I forgot to mention that one of the first remedies I tried was updating my motherboard drivers from the Gigabyte website (BIOS flash was a last resort). My problem though was that I did not update the RAID controller drivers. I don't know why, but after updating those specific drivers, the shut down / reset buttons now work like they should have all along. Thanks again for pinpointing the chipset driver problem. You've helped to eliminate a big daily annoyance. sakline345

If your mboard has RAID, yes, you must load the RAID drivers as well, even if you're not actually setting up RAID, because there are often no separate drivers listed for non-RAID but the drivers for non-RAID use are included. If you have the proper bios version part of the RAID support is in the bios. RAID is often an optional component of the mboard and there are bios versions for mboards with and without the RAID chipset. You're welcome.