acpi problem

[Guest]

I have been experiencing problems with serial port devices and Windows XP.
The manufacturer of the device suggested that this problem is related to acpi
and that we need to disable acpi in the bios and in Windows. Is there any
way to disable acpi in windows without reinstalling the OS as a standard pc
(f5 option)? Is it possible that these serial devices will not allow IRQ
sharing and that windows confuses the signal with some other device sharing
the IRQ? How much of this relies on the motherboard; I've read that windows
will enable acpi regardless of what the bios reports? Another interesting
thing is that it only has affected desktop systems and not laptops. What is
the difference between a serial port on a laptop and a serial port on a
desktop?

tia
Brian

 

[Chuck]

What kind of problems are you having with the serial ports? Lockups?
You can defeat much of ACPI by selecting always on.(Control Panel)
The Device Mfr may not be telling the whole story. Laptops have serial ports
integrated with the laptop bios and MBD. Most desktops these days have at
least one serial port integrated with BIOS and the MBD.
I assume that some sort of PCI buss card/device that behaves as a serial
port or ports. If so, it's more likely that the acpi functions on it are not
fully or correctly implemented.