# Help needed with BIOS settings



## Space cat (Jul 16, 2008)

I hope I'm in the right forum here because this might be an XP problem.

My mobo (Foxconn 845GV4MR-ES) has some BIOS settings that I can't make much sense of. I don't have the screen in front of me right now but I think they say Suspend Type.

One offers me S1(POS), S3 or S1&S3. The other offers Power-on Suspend or Stop Grant. After many hours of searching I think I know that S1 is Power-on Suspend and S3 is Suspend to RAM and that S3 cuts off more power. Stop Grant seems to leave the CPU running in a minimal mode which uses more power than POS.

The first puzzle is that Stop Grant would appear to be incompatable with S3 and yet I can select both! The biggest problem happened after I installed XP Pro. Thinking that the OS should be given the job of power management, I disabled all the disk and monitor shutdown options in BIOS and selected S1&S3 (so as to give XP maximum choice). I'm not certain whether I was using Stop Grant or not.

XP Pro installed successfully though the power options were minimal because I hadn't installed the chipset drivers. These took a long time to load and I was still missing a lot of power options: no Suspend and no Hibernate! (These had worked before but muggins failed to note the original BIOS settings. :embarased:embarased:embarased) I tried installing the drivers again but it made no difference.

I went back into BIOS and changed S1&S3 to plain S3. Suddenly XP presented me with Suspend and Hibernate options. Intrigued, I changed the BIOS to S1 and then back to S1&S3. I still had all the options but --

Although everything seemed to work power-wise, when I set the Off button to Hibernate it switched Off instead. Also, Device Manager says I have a Uniprocessor ACPI system and I'm sure it said ACPI Compliant System (or something similar) before.

What little I've found on the internet suggests that I'll end up re-installing XP. In this case, can anybody tell me how best to configure the BIOS.

PS: I've got the latest BIOS from Foxconn - 461XP219.


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## OMGmissinglink (Sep 24, 2006)

(S1) bios settings or your USB 2.0 ports under (S2/S3) function in standard mode.


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## Space cat (Jul 16, 2008)

I took a good look at the relevant BIOS setup options last night and wrote some stuff down. I hope it helps. The available options are in brackets followed by the current setting:

ACPI Function (Enable/Disable) Enabled
ACPI Suspend Type (S1(POS)/S3(STR)/S1&S3) Tried them all, currently S3
Run VGA BIOS if S3 resume (Auto/Yes/No) Auto
Power Management (User/Min saving/Max saving) User
Video Off Method (Blank/Sync+Blank/ DPMS) DPMS (My monitor is DPMS)
Video Off in Suspend (Yes/No) Yes
Suspend Type (POS/Stop Grant) Tried both, currently POS
Suspend Mode (1 min -> 1 hour or disabled) Disabled
HDD Power Down (1 -> 15 mins or disabled) Disabled
Soft-off by Button (Instant/4 sec delay) Instant
CPU Thermal Throttle (12.5% -> 87.5%) 12.5%
Wake on PCI (Enable/Disable) Disable
Power-on by Ring (Enable/Disable) Disable
Wake on LAN (Enable/Disable) Enable
USB Kbd Wake from S3 (Enable/Disable) Disable
Resume by Alarm (Enable/Disable) Disable

It's the ACPI Suspend Type that I originally set to S1&S3 , whereupon XP spat its dummy out and wouldn't give me any Suspend or Hibernate options. I think I tried S1(POS) next and the options magically appeared. Moreover, when I went back to the original S1&S3, they stayed put and worked. That's when I tried to set the power button to Hibernate but got Shutdown instead. To add another little mystery, my DVD writer came up as having no Region set and only 2 changes left but it was previously set to Region 2 with 4 changes left.

Next time I switched on. XP seemed to have put itself right in that the power button gave me Hibernate and my DVD drive was back to normal. But my experiance of Windows is that it doesn't just 'put itself right' without leaving a mess lurking somewhere out of sight. True or false???



> (S1) bios settings or your USB 2.0 ports under (S2/S3) function in standard mode.


I tried using the USB port under S1 and S3 and it worked as USB 2.0 in both cases. On the other hand, I can't see much difference between these two Suspend states. (The system fan stays on either way and I'd hoped it would shut down under S3.) Does this mean I don't actually have S3 at all? Is this part of the mess that XP is hiding from me? Alternatively, do you mean that a USB port will wake up from S3 in V1.1 mode? I haven't tried that.

PS: I checked what I had in Device Manager using View by Connection. It said ACPI Uniprocessor PC at the top with Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System underneath then a single processor + other stuff below that. I read somewhere else that "ACPI Uniprocessor PC" is correct - and necessary - if I ever want to upgrade to a hyperthreading CPU. Can anybody confirm or deny this?

PPS: I could start a new thread here but this is sort of related. My system fan, which is quite loud, doesn't switch off in Suspend mode but I'm fairly sure that the CPU fan does. Is this because the system fan doesn't have a wire to the speed sense pin on the mobo so the BIOS thinks it's stopped already?


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