Advanced Configuration and Power Interface - Slow boot on Neo2 Platinum

Question

Hi,
Recently I bought myself a Neo2 Platinum mainboard but in WinXP I got some stuttering problems while playing music in winamp. I remembered from my last Nforce2 mainboard that changing the WinXP HAL from 'ACPI Uniprocessor' toAdvanced Configuration and Power Interface' fixes this problem.
But when I try to do this it result in WinXP booting really slow (more than 10 minutes at least). Also a clean install of WinXP where I set the HAL manually during the installation gives the same problem after installing the nforce drivers.
Anyone else had this problem?
MSI Neo2 Platinum
Amd Athlon64 3000+
2* 512MB Corsair ValueSelect
Leadtek GeForce 6600GT
Seagate 120GB
OCZ Modstream 450W
WinXP

Answer 1

I also have the same problem.
I have a hardware independant image that i have built in MS VPC / MS VS05 which is then sysprep'd and captured into a WIM file.
Before i built my base image in the virtual environment, i configured all the automation files used to install windows, to include the latest Intel Matrix drivers v8.5, including the sysprep files in the base image.
I have a custom WinPE v2.1 that the machine boots of the network, and runs a vbscript in the background to partition the disks, and map drives to the network, it then extracts the WIM file to the hard disk, and copies the required drivers from the network share for the model being imaged, and then proceeds to updating the sysprep.inf.
One of the process's that is performed is checking what HAL to write into the sysprep file.
I have forced all the different types of HAL's by hard coding them in the sysprep, but after the machine reboots i get the black screen of nothing and no hard disk activity, if i reboot into safe mode it freezes on agpCPQ.sys.
I use this build process to support around 5,000 different machines at two different companies, there is proberly about 30 different models of machines that are supported by this image, (HP, Acer, Toshiba, IBM, Lenovo)and i only have the issue with the new Lenovo x301, T400 & T500.
I have spoken with Lenovo Australia, and dealt directly with the advanced system engineers and even forwarded them a copy of my image for testing, so far they have not been able to provide a solution.
They also sent me a copy of the restore disks for those models and windows xp installed without an issue, but the difference is that their image does a fully automated install where as my image is a sysprep'd image.
I checked the machines HAL type after it was imaged, and it is the same as the HAL used inside my VM Image.