"Soft" power-off?

[JohnD]

I've been setting up my stand-by PC.

I'm pretty sure I had it tuning itself fully off when I used "Start" "Turn off computer" "Turn Off" (after it had closed down the apps neatly).

Now it doesn't. Nor does the power key on the keyboard (although this will shut it down and turn it on again). It just shuts down windows, screen goes blank, but processor fan stays on. If I turn it on, it starts POST so I'm pretty sure it is "off". The keyboard power button will restart it from this state.

If I press and hold the power button on the PC for 5 or 6 seconds, it will turn off, but I see the first line or so of POST, as if the power key has started to turn it on.

While I was setting the PC up, I think I found a setting that said something like "turn off immediate or wait nn seconds" and I probably set it to 5 or 10 seconds (there used to be an old wives tale about PCs closing down too fast for the hard drives to empty their buffers onto the disk and close down corretly). However I now can't find this on Windows settings or the BIOS.

Windows did download a new BIOS version if that could be relevant.

It is a PCChips M810L motherboard.

I changed the jumper to allow power switching from keyboard, but it did this even before the change.

 

[Softus]

John, I sometimes see this problem and quite often never solve it because of the time it soaks up for relatively little gain.

For all of this to work, Windows has to arrange to shut off power when it's finished. I used to know how this all worked, but would have to refresh my memory to be accurate, however I'm sure it relies on motherboard drivers (and motherboard devices). I've found machines where this appears to go wrong, sometimes after a Microsoft/Windows update.

If I press and hold the power button on the PC for 5 or 6 seconds, it will turn off, but I see the first line or so of POST, as if the power key has started to turn it on.

This is beginning to sound like a problem between the motherboard and the PSU.

While I was setting the PC up, I think I found a setting that said something like "turn off immediate or wait nn seconds" and I probably set it to 5 or 10 seconds

This is almost certainly a BIOS configuration, not of the behaviour of a Windows shutdown, but of the effect of pressing the case power switch.

(there used to be an old wives tale about PCs closing down too fast for the hard drives to empty their buffers onto the disk and close down corretly).

This wasn't an old wives tale - under Windows 3.1 based on DOS, it was possible for DOS to cache disk writes for long enough for you hard power off and thus lose information. If the disk writes included FAT information then this was capable of causing quite a mess, and I was caught out myself by this once. Er, twice actually.

However I now can't find this on Windows settings or the BIOS.

That implies that it was one of your other machines.

Windows did download a new BIOS version if that could be relevant.

Eh? I've only just read this bit, and although it sounds related to what I said above, I'm struggling to believe that a Windows update would include a BIOS update. Are you sure?

 

[Stozzer]

Is ACPI turned on in the bios? there are some settings you can change to alter power shutdowns etc in there.
and does your pc show up as a ACPI uniprocessor/multiprocessor pc in device manager if you click Computer?

 

[tim west]

If I press and hold the power button on the PC for 5 or 6 seconds, it will turn off, but I see the first line or so of POST, as if the power key has started to turn it on.

Not necessarily, some text lines can be held in the buffer of the background DOS window you see at startup unless a CLS command has cleared them and you may be seeing the original startup text from bootup.

 

[Doc Lenny]

Check the date!!