Win XP SP-1 shut down issue

[bcsman]

Just got finished building a newer computer--using some older pieces--and am having a shut down problem. First I have Win XP SP-1 installed on an older Abit BH6 MB with a 600 Celeron processor OC'd to 900Mhz. Going to use this with my MyHD OTA tuner card. Anyhow everything works good until I try to shut down. Windows goes through the normal screens and when the screen goes black like it's going to shut down, I hear a click inside my computer case and a new screen pops up saying "It is now safe to shut down windows". I seem to remember Win 98 doing the same thing a few years ago, maybe it was Win 95!! When I push the power button on the front of my case nothing happens immediately, but after about 5-10 seconds it doesn't shut down but goes into a reboot!! The only way I can get it to truly shut off is to pull the power plug when it goes to the safe to shutdown screen. The power button works fine to start the computer and the reset button works fine to reset the computer. Any ideas out there??

 

[VirtualLarry]

Sounds like the ancient BIOS on that board, is not detected as ACPI-compliant by the XP installation routines. First off, I would check to see if there is a newer BIOS for that board. (If the BIOS was never user-upgraded, that's actually a likely possibility.) Secondly, your remaining options are to attempt to manually force ACPI on, or to simply enable/install APM support under XP, which will also support ATX soft-off upon OS shutdown I believe. (I don't recommend that though, the first thing I do personally when installing my own systems, is to disable the soft-off feature. It can in some cases cause registry corruption due to failure of write-caching due to delayed shutdowns. YMMV.)