The problem was simple in its horror. On a standard Intel box, NT 4.0 could turn off the display. But it couldn’t sleep. It couldn’t throttle the CPU. And when you hit the power button, you had to pray.
On a rainy Thursday, she tested S3 on a Dell OptiPlex. She clicked Start → Shutdown → Standby. acpi driver for nt
That was the dirty secret. Every BIOS vendor implemented ACPI differently. Some forgot to mark the video card as a wake-capable device. Others embedded AML loops that would run for minutes if interpreted naively. One particularly cursed laptop from Compaq had a _BIF (Battery Information) method that called itself recursively. The problem was simple in its horror