Windows won't power off the computer
You have just installed windows on your new computer, and when you tell it to shutdown, it doesn't turn off the computer, but just shows a screen saying, 'It is now safe to turn off your computer' . We explain why this happens and how to fix it.Unless the computer is very old ( before Pentium II ) then it should support shutting off automatically when windows shuts down, but that support is not always enabled.
We recently upgraded a server from windows NT to windows 2000, primarily so when could remotely power it down, without having to go and hit the off switch. The box was a Pentium III, so we had no doubt it would support shutting down. But on installing windows 2000, when we told it to shut down, it just took us to a screen saying, It is now safe to turn off your computer. This was not what we wanted.
After some investigation, it appeared that the computers BIOS did not have ACPI or APM enabled, which are required for windows to be able to shutdown, so we enabled them and restarted windows. Unfortunately, it did not pick up the new feature, and still refused to power down. So we searched the Microsoft knowledge base, and found mentions of installed APM support in windows manually, but no details of actually how to do it.
In the end, we reinstalled windows 2000, and this time it picked up the ACPI and APM support, and would powerdown the computer when windows shut down.
If anyone knows how to manually install support for APM/ACPI after windows has been installed, then please let us know.
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