Just rolled my own pc with an Athlon 1800, ASUS a7v333, & WinXP. When I choose Shutdown, XP goes through the motions but instead of powering off, it reboots.
I read elsewhere that the problem could be a hidden device called NT APM something or other, but I checked & it’s not there. I’m working around this now by putting the system into hibernation. Nice fix, works fine, but I’d really like to actually turn the dang thing off once in a while.
Any ideas on how to make it turn off? Please, no “smart” answers involving power cords, forced power off, etc.
I’ll be monitoring this thread frequently throughout the day, so if there are any follow-ups, hopefully I’ll be able to help you help me.
I’m not sure if this feature is still available in XP, but try bringing up the Boot Menu by hitting F8 during boot (keep pressing it as soon as the bios finishes). There should be a “logged” option that will log the startup/shutdown sequence.
Maybe by looking at the log after shutting down, you can see what the last thing unloaded was, and that may be causing the reboot.
I also think there’s a way to disable “fast shutdown”, try looking through your control panel (System maybe).
also, first update your OS in case there’s a patch to fix it… i know there’s a problem with some of the latest fast hard disk drives and the windows shut down process…
Thanks for all the suggestions. I’m not in front of my computer right now, but I DO have Roxio DirectCD installed and I seem to remember that the setting for “restart on system failure” is also on. I’ll try those fixes when I get home.
I’ve had the same problem with Win2K and I found that it was related to some software I’ve had running (I do have Roxio installed, but that wasn’t the problem, it was Progress Quest.), to shut the machine down, all I have to do is close Progress Quest and then the machine’ll shut down. Might be something similar on your machine if its not the Roxio software.