When I select ‘Shutdown’ the Windows XP Professional goes through the process of shutting down and powers down automatically. A friend of mine has a PC which is a Pentium III with 96 MB of RAM which also is running Windows XP Professional, however when he selects ‘Shutdown’ the PC goes through the process of shutting down but then displays the message ‘It is now safe to shutdown your computer’. He then has to manually press the power switch in order to completely power down the system. Is there a setting in XP that will allow us to make this Pentium III PC automatically power down like my computer?

The automatic power down feature of computers is generally a BIOS function. Windows can send the command to automatically power down, but unless the BIOS has this feature enabled it will not power down. To check whether this is enabled in the BIOS, restart the computer and during the power-on self test, a message should appear saying something like ‘Press DEL to enter setup’. Press the nominated key to enter the BIOS setup. Be very careful in here and make sure you don’t change any settings unless you know what you are doing (as it could cause your computer to become unbootable). As there are many different types of BIOS setups I cannot provide step-by-step instructions. However, the setting is likely to be in the Power Management section of the BIOS.

If the setting is already enabled, make sure that power management is enabled in Windows. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Control Panel’ and open the ‘Power Management’ control panel (if you are in Category View you may need to click ‘Performance and Management’ first). Have a look through the Power Management settings to make sure that power management is enabled. If there is a tab labelled ‘APM’ check whether the setting ‘Enable Advanced Power Management Support’ is enabled on this tab.

Should all else fail, there is a registry hack we can use to make the computer power down at shutdown. This should only be undertaken as a last resort, as I have not tested this solution and it could have unwanted side-effects. As always, take care when editing the registry as this is a volatile part of Windows. Note all original settings before changes are made in case you need to restore these values. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘regedit’ (without the quotes) and click OK. In the Registry Editor window, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinlogon. In the right-hand pane look for a value named ‘PowerdownAfterShutdown’. If this does not exist, go to the ‘Edit’ menu > ‘New’ > ‘String Value’ and name this value ‘PowerdownAfterShutdown’ (without the quotes). This string can have two values, 0 = default behaviour; or 1 = power down. Change the value of this string to ‘1′. If the value was already ‘1′ then change it to ‘0′. Close the Registry Editor and reboot the computer. Then, try to shutdown the computer to see if the change has fixed the problem. If not, you should go back into the registry and change the values back to how they were originally.