Why do so many people want to disable ACPI under Win2K?

[j@cko]

I thought it's good....?

 

[Agamar]

It is good as long as your hardware supports it. Unfortunately, most of the hardware people on this board use is not on the HCL

 

[jsm]

It's really only useful for laptops, in my opinion. Otherwise, not really worth the time.

It's all about yer BIOS and drivers. If yer Mboard BIOS is on the good BIOS list, you should be one step closer to using ACPI. Then you've got to make sure all your drivers are ACPI compliant. Iomega had some problems for a long while (their zip stopped my old HP laptop from going into save to disk).

 

[jaywallen]

I wouldn't say that ACPI is only useful on portable computers. I think the main advantage it confers is that it virtually eliminates the possibility that the system will become IRQ-bound (not having enough IRQs to support all the devices a user wishes to run simultaneously). I think of the actual power conservation benefits as being nice side-effects.

A lot of people, particularly hardware junkies who have been used to juggling devices and IRQs to suit themselves, seem to go into shock when they poke around in Device Manager under W2K and see a half-dozen or a dozen devices camped out on the same IRQ. The fact is that the real interrupt load is being handled by virtual IRQs, and the IRQ listed for multiple devices in the Device Manager is just a sort of "traffic cop". Anyway, a lot of these people panic or start bad-mouthing Microsoft whenever a device or devices on their systems start acting like crap. The real problem, of course, is that there's a bad device driver or two in the mix somewhere. It's the vendor of that non-compliant device / device driver who deserves the cussing, not Microsoft. Or it's possibly the user's fault for not having bothered to check the HCL to see if the devices s/he is trying to use with W2K are compliant with the OS. And I've even seen some people who wanted to go ahead and disable ACPI / install the standard PC HAL when there was nothing wrong with the way the system was performing in the first place! Many of them claim that their system's performance improves when they do this. I'll believe it's possible, but only in cases where there was a buggered device driver or two present in the first place.

Maybe it's just a matter of philosophy, but I'd say that disabling ACPI is best viewed as a temporary workaround to be used until you can get the device vendors to support their products properly or until you can replace the errant devices. I can't believe that choosing to run a standard PC HAL on a fully compliant system under W2K is a wise decision.

My $.02.

Regards,
Jim

 

[Nikepete]

I like ACPI, am using it on all my systems with Win2K, WinME except for the one with NT4. It's really nice to boot up the machine in 10 seconds with STR or hibernation.

 

[ddiccico]

I disabled acpi, and I can still use hibernation

 

[jjlawren]

I had to disable ACPI to keep the computer from killing the power itself and corrupting data on my hard drive, forcing me to reinstall W2K about every third time I shut down the computer. Now I have to manually shut off the power, but I actually have a stable computer.

 

[bigbootydaddy]

for those with sblive, its recommended that you dont have its irq sharing with anything else. thus you have to disable it to select custom irqs.

 

[rbV5]

IMHO, Most people that disable it because they're misinformed.

jjlawren has a valid point, and I experienced that myself. What I did was to shut down my comp with "restart" and turned my rig off right before it POST's so that I could keep the ACPI Hal.

<for those with sblive, its recommended that you dont have its irq sharing with anything else> I believe thats only a problem with the Standard Hal, my SB Live! Platinum 5.1 &quot;shares&quot; its IRQ with several devices...no problem.

 

[Shudder]

SBLive value shares its IRQ with ACPI.. yay, so it sucks.

If I disable ACPI I can't even boot into win2k

Help

 

[zzzz]

<< I had to disable ACPI to keep the computer from killing the power itself and corrupting data on my hard drive, forcing me to reinstall W2K about every third time I shut down the computer. Now I have to manually shut off the power, but I actually have a stable computer. >>



yes, that is one major problem with ACPI. Now I have heard sp2 of win2k corrects this. I wanted to go back to acpi after installing sp2 but how do I go about it, short of reinstalling everything?

Also about the manual shut down..If you enable APM support in the power options, it shuts down by itself.(you go through the screensaver settings for this)

 

[aircooled]

My Radeon 64 vivo work's much better now that I have disabled ACPI.

 

[bigbootydaddy]

<< I believe thats only a problem with the Standard Hal, my SB Live! Platinum 5.1 &quot;shares&quot; its IRQ with several devices...no problem. >>



ive said this beforeBTW, mostly on via boards, which is well know to be a problem with sblive)
1. go make a sound event for the right click pop up menu, like the normal win98 came with.
2. go down to start bar and right click.
3. hear it crackle?? now open task managers.
4. repeat step 4. watch your cpu usage jump to 100% or at least jump.

ive heard this isnt a problem with the value cards, but i have an xgamer, and it happens everytime.

hopefully sp2 somehow resolves this, cuz itll be a cold day in hell before creative gets of their pile of money to fix anything.

the easy way to fix this is disable sb16 emu, but thats only for win98, still looking for fix in win2k.this isnt the only problem, just merely a way to reproduce it.

 

[rbV5]

bigbootydaddy, I followed your direction to try to reproduce your problem. I don't get a crackle but a very slight delay(compared to just right-clicking on the desktop)and my cpu usage goes to 14% or so momentarily. Doesn't look like a problem on my rig.

 

[pulse8]

I get the same thing as you rbv5. The sound is delayed and sometimes there is a crackle. If this is a problem from sharing IRQs, I can live with it. I haven't had any other issues with my system because the sound card is sharing IRQs.

David

 

[rbV5]

Actually, when I remove the sound for the popup menu, my cpu utilization goes up EXACTLY the same when I right-click the taskbar, I don't think its a problem at all, it seems no different with or without the sound associated, just no sound. bigbootydaddy has something else going on.

 

[dcdomain]

Well, I didn't disable ACPI because of IRQ problems. Rather, I had the same problem that jjlawren had.

You can get most ACPI features back by re-enabling advance power management in the OS.

 

[bigbootydaddy]

yeah i can live with it too, but like in CS, the sound screws up, and this is the only way ive crashed win2k pro. i dunno if its related or not. i have latest everything and its really random.

the thing is, like on viahardware.com and other sites, its been beating a dead horse about the problem, its out there

no solutions yet tho.

 

[bigbootydaddy]

my sound card irq is shared with the highpoint controller, which i read can cause trouble, but the only thing, again, that i have noticed is the CS crash i said above and the random crackles.