The most overlooked feature in motherboards.

[silent tone]

In 1996, I worked tech support and we refused to repair/replace PCs where the power management features didn't work. Today, I work at a helpdesk supporting thousands of users and we still have the same policy. These aren't pieces of junk either. We use HP business PCs and Thinkpads.

My Nforce motherboard is unable to hibernate in XP (though it did under Win2k). It is unable to power on at specified times in the BIOS. Waking from standby works sometimes. It's not compatibility problems either. All I have plugged into it is a radeon 9500. AFAIK, standby can be implemented in 1 of 3 modes by the mobo manufacturer. Mine has the mode that keeps all the fans running -ugh. I suppose it's ACPI compliant, but that doesn't help me at all.

Is this the standard of today? If so, why does it suck so much?
If my experiences are the norm, I'd humbly ask that AT start including test results of these features in the reviews.

 

[AndyHui]

ACPI requires compliance from the motherboard BIOS and the Operating System, not the motherboard itself. Control must originate from the OS and not from the BIOS, however, as this causes many of the problems that plagued the original APM 1.0 and APM 1.2 specifications.

There's nothing wrong with the ACPI standard itself, but with so many different devices interacting with the operating system, dodgy drivers and buggy BIOSes are what is causing the problem.