ACPI HELP

I'm not completely PC literate perhaps, but not a complete rookie either. I built this machine and after solving some bad memory issues, it's worked great. Now it wont shut down. The screen goes into sleep mode but the machine will not. When i wake it up i do have to enter my password but while it's in screen saver the video card fan is definitely still running (I use a blank screen when in screen saver mode).

i cant see any power options in windows, I assume my ACPI mother board (Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L) has overridden them.

At POST i see the ACPI controller at the bottom of the list but there's no relative information on that line other than an IRQ, all other columns are blank. it's almost as if the ACPI is simply not loading.

The only thing i can think of that may have been loaded between working and not working is the installation of Connectivity VPN Client (need it to log onto work PC).

Gigabyte was absolutely useless.

It's always really hard, dealing with sleep mode issues. It could well be that your VPN client is holding open the LAN port and preventing hibernation.

Try turning off "wake on LAN" in your BIOS if you can.

You need to list all your hardware when asking for help.

Here's a little thing I've been playing around with to help us understand you better:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] leshooting

Wanted to poke around a bit before returning; Proximon is right - getting a PC to play nice with 'sleep' mode is often difficult, frustrating, and demands in-depth system-level troubleshooting, and, sometimes (often with OCd machines) turns out to be impossible, anyway. The first question I always ask is "why do you want to do this?" If you're relying on, say, a 'wake-up packet' to enable your machine to, say, let a video transcoder to pick off files as they appear, it might be worth the trouble. If it's just power savings, turn the &^%$ thing OFF, and put a little time into optimizing your boot-up sequence - you'll get a lot more results from much less effort. The problem with 'sleep' is that it's complex - there are at least four sleep modes, sometimes more, some will (or won't) work with a specific CPU or MOBO; all of your hardware - USB devices, HDDs, PCI hardware, drivers, all have both to be set correctly in the BIOS and in whatever windows you're running, and, again, each and every setting may take tweaking and experimentation. If you've got a reason, and the ambition, I can help - but we will need lists - lots of lists: all h'ware, driver versions, service pack level, everything; or, alternatively, I can help with getting that boot speed up so you can just tell it "OFF"! (BTW - the first quick boot trick I know is 'windows 7'!