Unable to fully Restart, Shut down or Sign out for the past 9 months.

I have been unable to fully Restart, Shut down or Sign out my old Alienware laptop for the past 9 months.
I've always had to resort to the Power button.

I'm currently on Windows 10 Pro Insider Preview x64 Build 18908 but it has been the same for at least the past 8 or so builds.

What is it that controls the power functions .i.e. software, hardware (drivers) or both please?

Apart from from being annoying it dosen't help when a Windows update says not to turn off your computer!

Thanks for any ideas everyone!

thewizardoz said:

I have been unable to fully Restart, Shut down or Sign out my old Alienware laptop for the past 9 months.
I've always had to resort to the Power button.

I'm currently on Windows 10 Pro Insider Preview x64 Build 18908 but it has been the same for at least the past 8 or so builds.

What is it that controls the power functions .i.e. software, hardware (drivers) or both please?

Apart from from being annoying it dosen't help when a Windows update says not to turn off your computer!

Thanks for any ideas everyone!

Incompatible ACPI BIOS/driver?

On an old laptop I've had similar issues and with each Windows update had to go and manually disable hibernation in order to restore smooth functioning to startup and shutdown.

thewizardoz said:

Thanks mike s.

Yes, I was suspecting an incompatible ACPI BIOS/driver. With the currently installed drivers, their version numbers are the same as all of the Intel drivers (latest) that are installed but their dates are very old e.g. 2006.

My laptop is an old Alienware M17xR3 with 32GB RAM, 800GB SSD, 2TG SATA drive and a nVidia Quadro 4GB K4000M graphics card. Yes, I know it's an oldie but on a disability pension I can't afford a new one.

So, regarding that incompatible ACPI BIOS/drivers, I was thinking of uninstalling ALL of the current ACPI drivers that I have installed making sure that they a removed from the machine then rebooting and hoping that Windows 10 can locate or download and install usable ones. Does that sounds like the best approach please? Anyone?

Thanks again.

Have you tried running the driver update assistant app downloaded from the Intel web site? It might be able to identify a newer chipset driver than your manual search.

mike s said:

Have you tried running the driver update assistant app downloaded from the Intel web site? It might be able to identify a newer chipset driver than your manual search.

Yes mate but it just comes up and says there are no updates - as it has done for the past 4 years!

One thing that I did notice was that when I went through the details of my current installed drivers the version numbers al had "18908" as the second last part of the version - which is OF COURSE the version of the Insider Build that I'm currently running!! Duh!! That's why they all look "late" versions to me initially!!!

So I have uninstalled each of them, downloaded the Dell drivers for my model laptop for Windows 7 x64 (they haven't put out any later versions) and will be trying to install all of those "old" drivers today.

I'll come back here later and let you know how I went.

Thanks for responding.