ACPI questions -- what am I missing out on?

[Michael West]

I disabled ACPI in my BIOS and reinstalled XP HE because
the prior attempt was crashing with errors that were reported
as illegal ACPI reads/writes by the BIOS. Now XP is happy --
no more crashes of that type. BUT I'm wondering what
the disadvantages of NOT using ACPI are, and whether
I should consider a hardware upgrade. I am using the AMD
Athlon 1.05 GHz and except for the ACPI problem I am
satisfied with performance.

Expert advice humbly requested.

--
Mike W

[Lemon Jelly]

Michael West prematurely pulled the chain & typed:
> I disabled ACPI in my BIOS and reinstalled XP HE because
> the prior attempt was crashing with errors that were reported
> as illegal ACPI reads/writes by the BIOS. Now XP is happy --
> no more crashes of that type. BUT I'm wondering what
> the disadvantages of NOT using ACPI are, and whether
> I should consider a hardware upgrade. I am using the AMD
> Athlon 1.05 GHz and except for the ACPI problem I am
> satisfied with performance.
>
> Expert advice humbly requested.

ACPI gives most of the power management to the OS where APM is
controlled mostly by the Bios. I have never used APM, so I'm not sure
what level of Standby you get. Mine will Standby with total silence
(S3), can be woken to perform tasks at night then immediately go back to
sleep without waking the screen. My PC under ACPI will also enter
Standby after a preset time. ACPI also integrates with Plug&Play & can
power down PCI cards or external USB devices as well. I can also resume
from either Boot, Standby or Hibernate with either my mouse or spacebar.
If PM isn't important, probably not a lot of difference.
HTH, Paul