Kind of depends how hardware-hacky you are.

You can *kind of* turn a soft-power-on ATX PSU into an AT-style switch-only PSU by removing the green signal wire from the mobo-side connector and making a switch from that (test this before rewiring everything). The ground should go to one of the ground lines for the PSU and follow all precautions to make sure you don't accidentally ground or short anything else.

Not having the green line from the PSU to Mobo should prevent software shutdowns. This will also prevent a software shutdown if you want it to, as well.

In the bad old early days this was not a reliable feature and a lot of early ATX systems would get stuck at that shutdown screen, seemingly on a case-by-case basis.

I sympathize, I did a quick search on this and search engines really only refer you to how to prevent this situation.

unrelated but you can trick an ATX power supply into thinking it's "always on" by using a paperclip and inserting one end to the green wire and another to a black ground one. Handy for powering up hard drives and peripherals

oeuvre wrote:

unrelated but you can trick an ATX power supply into thinking it's "always on" by using a paperclip and inserting one end to the green wire and another to a black ground one. Handy for powering up hard drives and peripherals

Weeeeeeellllll I wouldn't use a paperclip in a working system, but a patch wire of the right gauge would also work. If you had a physical switch on the back of the PSU you could do this and use that switch to turn it off and on without wiring the power button - but the power button would do nothing at this point.

The correct way is early during setup you can select "standard PC" instead of "ACPI PC" or something like that, From memory same screen as setting the keyboard?

or from the last post here
http://discussions.virtualdr.com/showthread.p … PI-in-Win-98-SE

1) Run REGEDIT (Start --> run --> regedit). Go to the key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CURRENTVERSION\DETECT

2) With the Detect key highlighted in the left pane, look in the right side pane for a subkey called ACPIOption. If it is there then double click on it and change its value to 2, then click OK. If it is not there then right click in the right side pane and select NEW, then DWORD value. Type in the Give the new key name of ACPIOption (mind the capitalizatin), hit enter. Now double click on the ACPIOption subkey and give it a value of 2, then click OK.

3) Reboot

4) Once windows is up again go in to Add/Remove Hardware in Control Panel. Tell it to detect new hardware. Accept the hardware it found and let it install the drivers. When it asks to reboot do so.

Have your Windows install cd handy. When the system comes back up it will start (re)installing a lot of hardware (drivers) and it will need access to the cabs on the cd. After its finished finding and installing the newly found hardware it will likely want to reboot again. Let it. If it doen't ask then do a reboot yourself.

At this point the ACPI bios based drivers should have been replaced with basic Plug and Play ones. You can check under device manager (System devices) to see.

Now the above method is not the most "tidy" as it will leave behind a number of no-longer used entries in the registry. Using the method of deleteing the Enum registry key first that was described in the article Nick Grana referenced will not leave behind these "old" entries. But the downside is that you may also have to reinstall drivers for various other devices you have (have added) sound cards, net cards, etc, etc). Your choice as to what ya want to do. It actually may be less painfull to just not worry about the left-behind entries.

This admittedly might be a bit of a late reply, but I'm looking for the same thing as OP.

I have a i440BX Slot 1 board, and pretty much all the parts are old, except for the PSU, which is semi-modular.

Any tips?

The post immediately above yours covers most of it. The PSU shouldnt need modified in any way, the software changes simply stop windows telling the board to turn off.

Alright, so, just to be absolutely sure, the power supply (regardless of form factor or age) has nothing to do with whether or not this message shows up when Windows 9x is done shutting down?

If that's the case, I'll post an image of the Power Management part of the board's bios and see if anything there needs to be changed first.

Correct.

On ATX systems, the PSU is switched on and off by the motherboard itself. When Windows shuts down, and is in "ACPI" mode, it sends a power off command to the motherboard, which then turns the power off.

If you remove the ACPI signalling, it doesnt get told to switch off, and instead displays the screen telling you to turn it off. You then press the power switch on the case, which signals the motherboard to shut down the PSU. The motherboard is still "in charge" of the PSU and the PSU doesnt know anything different is occuring.

I doubt you need to touch the BIOS, just need to turn it off from within Windows.

I should add, that on AT systems, the motherboard has no control over the PSU at all, which is why that screen exists. The power switch on most AT machines is a mechanical switch.

Alright. I removed all ACPI-related hardware from Windows 98, making use of instructions from a post up above, but nothing changed. Is there something else I'm missing here?

Is Windows 98 more insistent on forcing the use of ACPI features than Windows 95? IIRC, I was always able to keep Win95 from powering itself off by disabling APM or ACPI in CMOS (not in the OS itself)...but I haven't tested this in a broad enough range of hardware to make across-the-board conclusions.

I've always had the same sentiment as the original poster. To me, being able to physically switch off the computer myself is an intrinsic element of the satisfaction of using it! I like the soothing visual image of Win9x's "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen, and I also like how the user has the ability to reboot the machine from this screen or reconfigure Windows to shut down to the DOS prompt instead.

When I first used a computer with a soft-touch power switch in the late 1990s, I was shocked that the manufacturer had allowed a physical hardware switch to become commandeered by software...and shocked that Microsoft had implemented "automatic turn-off" on Windows 95 without providing any obvious option in Control Panel for the user to disable this presumptuous behaviour! 22 years later, I'm no longer shocked...but I still prefer to turn off my own computer.

Andrew T wrote:

I like the soothing visual image of Win9x's "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen, and I also like how the user has the ability to reboot the machine from this screen or reconfigure Windows to shut down to the DOS prompt instead.

Honestly, yeah. If I want to have a proper Windows 98 PC, I want to turn it off myself by pressing the power button after seeing the "It is now safe to turn off your computer" message. Not have the computer turn itself off.