Dells freeze on shutdown

[Triffid]

Dell Dimension XPS T550s, originally delivered with NT4 installed.

I'm refurbishing for resale, and installing XP Pro SP2 (slipstreamed)
for demonstration purposes.

When told to shut down, they all freeze at the "Windows is shutting
down" screen - mouse and keyboard are unresponsive - and never power off.

Is a solution available?

 

[Malke]

Dell Dimension XPS T550s, originally delivered with NT4 installed.

I'm refurbishing for resale, and installing XP Pro SP2 (slipstreamed)
for demonstration purposes.

When told to shut down, they all freeze at the "Windows is shutting
down" screen - mouse and keyboard are unresponsive - and never power
off.

Is a solution available?

The hang at shutdown is on a machine with nothing on it except XP SP2?
And what are the hardware specs on these boxen?

Malke

 

[D.Currie]

Dell Dimension XPS T550s, originally delivered with NT4 installed.

I'm refurbishing for resale, and installing XP Pro SP2 (slipstreamed) for
demonstration purposes.

When told to shut down, they all freeze at the "Windows is shutting down"
screen - mouse and keyboard are unresponsive - and never power off.

Is a solution available?

If the computers were built to run NT4, chances are they're not fully
compliant with XP; I've seen that with a lot of older computers that are now
running XP. And in a nutshell, there's not too much you can do except learn
to push the button to turn the computer off. You might see if there's a bios
update that will help, but chances are this is just something you will have
to live with.

And...assuming that when you say you're installing XP for demo purposes
only, it's so that they can verify that everything works, and that you're
going to wipe the drive before you hand it over to the customers...a
software fix wouldn't matter much, because the customer is going to be
loading his/her operating system of choice on the machine when they get it.

 

[Triffid]

Triffid wrote:




The hang at shutdown is on a machine with nothing on it except XP SP2?
And what are the hardware specs on these boxen?

Malke

The boxes have 440BX chipsets, P3 550Mhz processors, 256MB RAM, and 13GB
disks. They powered off on shutdown under NT4 SP6a.

I run an unattended install of XP PRO with SP2 slipstreamed. When it's
done, I review device manager to ensure all hardware components were
detected and installed, then shut down - at which point XP freezes.

Triffid

 

[Triffid]

If the computers were built to run NT4, chances are they're not fully
compliant with XP; I've seen that with a lot of older computers that are now
running XP. And in a nutshell, there's not too much you can do except learn
to push the button to turn the computer off. You might see if there's a bios
update that will help, but chances are this is just something you will have
to live with.

Thanks for the suggestion - turns out the BIOS on these boxes is several
revisions behind the latest available from Dell, and the release notes
mention ACPI updates (although not specifically for XP compliance). The
box I installed XP on after updating the BIOS powers off, so I expect
the others will too if I reinstall XP (just updating BIOS doesn't cure it).

And...assuming that when you say you're installing XP for demo purposes
only, it's so that they can verify that everything works, and that you're
going to wipe the drive before you hand it over to the customers...a
software fix wouldn't matter much, because the customer is going to be
loading his/her operating system of choice on the machine when they get it.

Yes, but I anticipate most customers will choose XP - better to fix it,
or tell the customer upfront about the shutdown problem, than have them
complain later.

Triffid