I've just installed Mandrake 10.1 on a rather elderly PC (a PII Dell previously running Win 95). It only has 32 MB RAM, so I've no GUI running at the moment (though have installed X.org).

One irritatating problem I'm having at the moment is that I can't get the PC to power down properly. When I shut down, I get the "Power down", but then the computer neither shuts itself down automatically nor responds when I press the power button to shut it off manually.

To turn it off, I'm having to hit the "reset" button then hit the power button immediately afterwards. Not particularly satisfactory!

I've tried using "acpi=force" to turn on ACPI, but dmesg still says that my BIOS is too old for ACPI to work.

If you look in the bios, is APM supported?

How would I check for this?

When I enter the BIOS set-up, under "Power" there is an option for either enabling or disabling ACPI power management. At present this is enabled, with 16 minutes as the period of inactivity required. Is that what you meant?

I don't recall seeing any other choices of power management system.

Try APM instead of ACPI. APM is the old standard of handling power management.