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Shutdown issue in Windows 95 (AT mobo Power settings?)

Syntho

Experienced Member
Joined
Feb 23, 2022
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83
It's been about 25 years since I've used '95. I can't get it to shut down properly. It goes to the screen saying wait while your computer is shutting down and as far as I remember there's supposed to be another screen afterward that says it's safe to turn off your computer. Mine has the former screen, but not the latter. Instead it goes to just a blank black screen and hangs there. When I turn it off and boot up later, it runs scan disk every single time.

The PC is an AT-style motherboard with a Pentium 1. I've read that the issue isn't so bad on later ATX style motherboards since you don't have to physically turn off the PC via a switch. I also read that there's some sort of power setting either in the BIOS or in Windows itself to keep the older AT PCs from hanging but I'm unsure.

Does anyone know how to remedy this?
 
Tried that and it's still giving issues.
Did you turn off APM in the BIOS, I remember having that issue with 95 / 98, I either disabled APM in the BIOS or disabled something to do with APM in the BIOS, Not sure which now though but i definitely did it from within the BIOS and it cured my shut down issue.
 
Cracked it. I visited this page: http://educ.jmu.edu/~jarvislb/utils/shutdown.html and went through each one. Step 12 is what worked:

    1. On the Device Manager tab, select System Devices. Select Plug and Play BIOS, and then click to select the Disable NVRAM / ESCD updates check box on the Settings tab.

    • start -> settings -> control panel -> system

I'm not too savvy with motherboards. I know what NVRAM is and I guess it's just the CMOS memory in this context but correct me if I'm wrong. I just read that ESCD means Extended System Configuration Data but not sure what it means for this either. And I also don't know why disabling this option is curing the issue.

It's working now but if anyone has a minute to spare to explain, I always like learning :)
 
Interesting. I've never had to mess with that setting before.
 
I think since Windows 95 is a plug&play OS itself, it can write back hardware changes to the CMOS, which it does on shutdown. ESCD is the part of the CMOS holding that data. If updating does not work for whatever reason, it will hang on shutdown.

Thing is, however, that was pretty much the norm. Most Win95 systems I saw in my life did not correctly shutdown, nor did Win98. :ROFLMAO:
 
I've never seen the problem. It's always been either the orange screen saying to turn it off, or it just turns off by itself. Maybe I was just lucky.
 
I have the same issue on my K6-2 system. I noticed if I run scandisk, it will work again for a few shutdowns, then go back to the blank screen. Nothings been corrupted so far, so I just lived with it. I'll try this fix this evening. Thx for the tip!
 
Let us know if it works. Also try the other things on the page I listed.

Back in 1995 I remember not even being able to get Windows 95 to boot for months so I just used it as a DOS machine. Even after we got it to boot eventually, there were so many issues in the OS that we just dealt with it as normal. So coming back to 95 after nearly 30 years and running into some of the same issues (CDROM stops reading during installation, have to have the right boot disk, have to put the cab files on your HD beforehand, installation becomes corrupted and your PC won't even detect 95 anymore due to restarting without shutting down properly, etc), it's both nostalgic and a headache. I'm not sure how I survived it back then having to figure it all out on my own.
 
Before I create a new thread for this let me post it here:

I have a 3.5" and a 5.25" floppy on my machine. I can only access one floppy from Windows 95. Both show up in My Computer as A: and B:, but when accessing B:, it accesses the A drive instead. Weird. It's all working when I boot into DOS though. Another one of those weird W95 things.
 
Apart from work I never used Windows 95 at home at all. The first Win9x system I got was an IBM PC300 mini tower Celeron 400 set up with the first version of Windows 98 and found that quite pleasant experiance. I guess not being a hard core gamer helped there. After that XP. Then on to Linux full time.
 
Let us know if it works. Also try the other things on the page I listed.

Back in 1995 I remember not even being able to get Windows 95 to boot for months so I just used it as a DOS machine. Even after we got it to boot eventually, there were so many issues in the OS that we just dealt with it as normal. So coming back to 95 after nearly 30 years and running into some of the same issues (CDROM stops reading during installation, have to have the right boot disk, have to put the cab files on your HD beforehand, installation becomes corrupted and your PC won't even detect 95 anymore due to restarting without shutting down properly, etc), it's both nostalgic and a headache. I'm not sure how I survived it back then having to figure it all out on my own.
I have installed Win95 many times over the years and never seen these issues. Are you using the same Win95 CD now that you were back then? Maybe you have a bad disc.
 
Cracked it. I visited this page: http://educ.jmu.edu/~jarvislb/utils/shutdown.html and went through each one. Step 12 is what worked:



I'm not too savvy with motherboards. I know what NVRAM is and I guess it's just the CMOS memory in this context but correct me if I'm wrong. I just read that ESCD means Extended System Configuration Data but not sure what it means for this either. And I also don't know why disabling this option is curing the issue.

It's working now but if anyone has a minute to spare to explain, I always like learning :)

Soft power control, which was part of ACPI/APM, used on ATX motherboards was a recent technology when Windows 95 was introduced. In fact, they were released right around the same time.

There were few motherboards in those days that ever got ACPI/APM implemented properly, OEMs usually just fudged the ACPI tables so things *mostly* worked and called it good enough. Unfortunately, that trend never really went away and there are PC motherboards to this day that have broken/incomplete ACPI tables that cause all matters of havoc. Motherboards with broken ACPI implementations often couldn't soft power off cleanly in Windows 9x, and would get stuck on the "Windows is shutting down" screen.

Another thing they'd do is not allow the processor to idle down properly. Back in those days, APM was extremely basic. There was no clock ramping, instead the CPU would just send NOP instructions into the pipeline to tell the CPU to do nothing. This reduced the power consumption considerably, when it actually worked. Boards with broken ACPI tables wouldn't let this happen, so Windows 9x had to do something called "spinning" where the kernel would just run a tight loop of checks/waits until something needed to be done and break out of the loop. Problem with this is that since it wasn't a NOP, the CPU was still processing instructions and would consume more power. There were eventually some utilities like "Rain" released to fix the problem on broken boards.
 
NOP has nothing to do with power saving. Maybe you meant HLT.
 
NOP has nothing to do with power saving. Maybe you meant HLT.

No.


NOP was used, and is still used in some cases to reduce power consumption if the newer PAUSE instruction isn't available.

HLT is less useful because it stops the entire processor until it receives an interrupt.
 
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