[muckshifter]

Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 2000 and Windows XP support two forms of power management. These are APM (Advanced Power Management) and ACPI (Advanced Configuration Power Interface). Although the differences may not seem significant to the end user under Win98, Win98SE and WinME, there are major differences under Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

APM 1.2, the last APM standard, is a a BIOS-based scheme of system power management. It provides CPU and device power management and uses device activity timeouts to determine when to transition devices to low power states.

Unfortunately, APM has a number of problems associated with it.

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