So another day and yet another adventure on my return journey to Ubuntu. After all the fun I had doing my first UEFI linux install, which is a story I will save for another time, my Dell Inspiron 7537 had been working just fine. Then, for no discernible reason, it decided that it was not going to listen to me anymore. Like a petulant child it would not go to bed (turn off) and wanted to stay up and continue to watch late night TV (restart)…….anyway enough with this convoluted metaphor, it was very annoying.

After much digging I found the post from DuckHook on this thread was the most helpful. The first suggestion of installing laptop-mode-tools and then running $ laptop_mode made no detectable difference. However step 3 seemed to fix the problem. This involved telling the ACPI not to route interrupt requests which the kernel might not have released. If these IRQ’s were persisting, it could cause the BIOS (or in this case the UEFI) to cycle when the system goes to power down.

So I edited the /etc/default/grub file so that the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line included a "acpi=noirq" statement and then ran $ sudo update-grub .

This fixed the shutdown problem however I did suspect that the IRQ issue may not be the whole story. So I removed the acpi statement from the grub config file and updated grub again. Low and behold the shutdown issue was still fixed. I would love to pretend I know what the heck had fixed it, I suspect that updating grub reset a corrupted config file somewhere, but I am just happy my laptop goes to bed when I tell it too!