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ACPI and standby

My main personal computer crashed last week, as I mentioned on July 12 [1]. I managed to get everything working again, with one exception- standby mode.

I had disabled all power management features in my BIOS as part of my debugging process. I discovered that ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface [2]) has to be enabled for Windows XP x64 to boot, but that’s the only thing I left on. I’ve had everything up and running for a while now, so I wanted to start re-enabling features. In particular, I want to get it so that my system can properly enter standby mode.

When I started the process, activating standby mode on my computer turned off the monitor and (I believe) the hard drive- main power was still on. Worse yet, nothing I did would restore “normal” state- I had to power off/reset completely, which kind of negated the value of “standby”.

I re-enabled power management in BIOS and…nothing changed. I then reset my BIOS to factory defaults and…nothing changed. Getting creative, I downloaded the latest version of my motherboard’s BIOS [3] (Asus K8V deluxe, current BIOS version 1011). After reflashing the BIOS…nothing changed. I was still not able to successfully enter/exit standby.

Then I read a bit about ACPI power states [4]. I remembered seeing something in the BIOS settings about “S1 and S3”. I really didn’t want to use the S1 standby state (power on suspend), so I changed this setting to “S3 only”….this time, it worked! 🙂

The odd thing is…not only does my computer enter the “correct” standby state (powering down / shutting off the fans), but it also now restarts when I touch the keyboard or mouse. I guess I could worry about why it *doesn’t* restart properly when S1 is enabled, but I don’t want to use that power state anyway…