We sell several motherboards (mostly MSI) that have a bios option to disable "IPCA". This is acpi backwards to get around MS's requirement (for XP certification, MS doesn't say it won't work) to not have the option.
I saw my first piece of hardware the other day that wouldn't work with acpi off. it was a SMC gigabit ethernet card (natsemi chipset) on a Tyan Tiger MP (S2460). If ACPI was disabled, the link lights on the card would go out, and both XP and 2K said "no network connection." We found this problem when a customer brought back one of the NIC's because it wouldn't load the driver correctly (in win2k, different motherboard I think). I tested it on the Tyan board w/ XP pro and sure enough, if ACPI was off the driver wouldn't load. I imagine they'd disabled ACPI since they intended to use linux for the systems (part of a cluster) after they tested all the hardware. Enabling ACPI allowed the built-in XP driver to work.
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We sell several motherboards (mostly MSI) that have a bios option to disable "IPCA". This is acpi backwards to get around MS's requirement (for XP certification, MS doesn't say it won't work) to not have the option.
I saw my first piece of hardware the other day that wouldn't work with acpi off. it was a SMC gigabit ethernet card (natsemi chipset) on a Tyan Tiger MP (S2460). If ACPI was disabled, the link lights on the card would go out, and both XP and 2K said "no network connection." We found this problem when a customer brought back one of the NIC's because it wouldn't load the driver correctly (in win2k, different motherboard I think). I tested it on the Tyan board w/ XP pro and sure enough, if ACPI was off the driver wouldn't load. I imagine they'd disabled ACPI since they intended to use linux for the systems (part of a cluster) after they tested all the hardware. Enabling ACPI allowed the built-in XP driver to work.