Fast shutdown using power button?

T

TonyG

I have two machines running Windows 2000. One is a notebook and the other is
a desktop. On the notebook I can do a fast (3-5 secs) shutdown by flicking
the power button, but on the desktop I can't. Both machines have APM. The
major difference between them is the notebook was upgraded from W2K whereas
the desktop is a clean install.

Is there a setting that controls fast shutdown via the power button?

Tony
 
S

Simon Geary

Power Options in Control Panel. The advanced tab lets you choose what should
happen when the power button is pressed.
 
T

TonyG

Yeah, choices are "Power Off" or "Standby" and it is already set to "Power
Off". Doesn't help, I'm sorry to say. Any other thoughts?

Tony
 
S

Steve Parry [MVP]

TonyG said:
Thanks Steve, but I think you missed the point of my question. If I
hold down the power button for five seconds, the PC does a complete
power-off. That's fine when it's locked up. But what I want is to
enable a fast shutdown of Windows 2000 from a short press of the
power button, as I can do on my IBM Thinkpad notebook. The notebook
takes about a minute to shutdown from the start menu, but can be shut
down in less than five seconds by flicking the power button. It still
logs the user off and goes through a shutdown routine, but very
accelerated and great when you just want to switch off because of a
storm or something. The desktop won't do this. I don't believe it's
unique to the Thinkpad, because I used to have a Win2000 tower at
work that had the same function enabled. There must be a setting in
Windows that allows this to happen - I can't see it being a BIOS
issue, because Windows appears to have a special routine to deal with
it.

Any ideas?

Tony

Often you need to tell the bios how to deal with you briefly pressing the off switch.

It may be set up to ignore a casual press of the button and therefore does not tell Windows that the
button has been pressed hence windows does not initiate a shutdown.
 
T

TonyG

OK, thanks, I'll look into that.

Tony

Steve Parry said:
Often you need to tell the bios how to deal with you briefly pressing the off switch.

It may be set up to ignore a casual press of the button and therefore does not tell Windows that the
button has been pressed hence windows does not initiate a shutdown.
 
T

TonyG

OK, I did take a look in the bios and there are two settings, but I have
tried both and still no joy. I'd still like to know what happens in those
machines where the fast-shutdown does work - Windows must have a setting
somewhere which is receptive to what the machine sends (for standby?). I
recall that in Win98 we were being told to disable "fast shutdown" to get
rid of hanging problems on shutdown. Is there a setting in Win2000 that also
disables fast shutdown? And is it, by default, disabled? Or was that
something quite different?

Tony
 
T

TonyG

Steve Parry said:
have you looked in the power options in control panel to ensure
advanced power options are ticked

OK, something odd here. There is no advanced power options box to tick. I
have checked all the tabs on the PM, and it's not there. All I have are
[Power Scheme] options to control power down on peripherals, and [Advanced]
what to do when I press the power button. There are also Hibernate and UPS
tabs. But the APM tab is not there. What does this mean? This machine
definitely has APM. It is a Packard Bell Pentium III 650 and only about four
years old.

Tony
 

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