Question : Getting ACPI working properly

Having discovered what ACPI is I decided to try and get it working.
I have Soltek SL-75KV Socket A M'board, Award BIOS, AMD Athlon cpu, 2 HDD on Promise Ultra100 controller (Quantum 8GB Caviar in a hot swap caddy, and older 2GB WD), Win98SE
First problem is the jargon. "Sleep", "Suspend",  "Standby", and "Hibernate" are terms used in my software and hardware manuals. I wonder if they are all the same thing.

So I set up the BIOS settings for STR (Suspend to RAM) as that is the option I think I like best.
I installed Win98SE with the /P J switch to force ACPI to be installed. After installing device drivers all looks good. No problems in CtrlPanel-System-Devices. ACPI seems installed and working. Shutdown menu has Standby option but nothing else new (Are there meant to be several options here?). In Power Management I selected to use PC power switch to activate "Standby".

Going into "Standby" seems to work fine, though a small dialog box appears for too short a time to read as it does so and the PC shuts down suprisingly fast.

Main power LED of PC is off not blinking as documented.
(There is an additional LED I added to the m'board pins said to indicate "Sleep mode" but that behaves just like the main power LED)

I cannot wake it from the keyboard but a phone call (even with modem turned off) or a power cycle of the modem wakes the system. [I set it to wake on lan in bios]

However, it appears the HDD is not read.
First I get the BIOS screen of the graphics card. Then I get the blue desktop (without icons) and a series of prompts with no text except for "mstask [Close]", "Explorer [Close]" "Systray [Yes|No|Cancel]"
Then typically a message about being unable to write to the drive and the first of several dark blue screen errors which necessitate a reboot.

If I should persevere with ACPI... what should I try next?

Answer : Getting ACPI working properly

It works much the same way. The write verify, if you think about it, is a timed delay.