Having read about acpi and apm a little earlier I had turned off acpi on this old dell to see if I could clear up a problem with a new monitor card. Net result, no internet connection since the computer could no longer find eth0. So I replaced acpi=force which is the only way modern flavors of Linux will run acpi at all with apm=on in the menu.lst file and all seems to be working as before. If the material in gentoo documentation is correct acpi and apm are two competing standards and apparently apm is the more modern of them.
