Sigma

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how do you change the irq settings, my vid. card is sharing with my sound card, nic, the via usb drivers etc... all on port 11. I know this is not good. how do i change this so as to have my vid card on its own irq along with the other drivers which belong with it,like pci sharing?
 

dmcmahon

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Are you using W2K? This is a known problem with it, it always puts all PCI devices (that includes the AGP and USB) on the same IRQ. The only approved way to avoid this is to do something during the install (press F5 at the right time to manually configure your hardware) and disable ACPI.
 

dmcmahon

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I've never done it so I'm not sure it works. If you search MSFT's web site you will find better instructions. In a nutshell, the procedure is supposed to be as follows:

During the first phase of Setup, at the Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration screen, press the F5 key. You can select 'Standard PC' instead of an ACPI option.
You can also press F7 during the portion of setup that displays the message to press F6 for adding SCSI drivers. This configures Setup to not try ACPI machine types. Note that it's a good idea to disable "Plug-and-Play OS" in your BIOS first.

There is a variant of this procedure that involves hacking the install image, that way you don't need to press F5. This procedure is as follows:

1. Copy the i386 directory off the Windows 2000 CD onto your hard drive.

2. Go into the i386 directory on your HDD and find the txtsetup.sif. Open it with notepad.

3. Find the [ACPIOptions] section in the file. Below will be a setting for ACPIEnable - set it to 0.

4. Install Windows 2000 using your hard drive copy. Again, disable PnP OS in the BIOS if you can before doing this.

Finally, there is a procedure that some hacker worked out that avoids the need to re-install. MSFT advises against doing this, however. The procedure is as follows:

1. Disable PNP OS and ACPI in your BIOS, if you can.

2. Reboot. Go to Control Panel - Hardware and double click on My Computer in the hardware manager.

3. You'll see ACPI - get into its properties and click to install another driver. When prompted, look under the Microsoft section and install the "Standard PC" driver.

4. Reboot. At this point Win2k will try and reinstall all devices on your system so install any drivers you are prompted for (have them all handy) and reboot. Finalise any drivers you may be prompted for on the 2nd boot and reboot again.

5. With all your drivers re-installed, take a look in hardware manager and every device should have its own IRQ.
 
G

Guest

Guest
Unless you are having probs, on W2K this issue doesn't matter (remember this is NT5 not DOS); as it uses virtual irq. Do install with Plug n Play in bios set to OFF.

You can install manually using the F5 switch as previously discussed, have done it both ways several times (on Asus and MSI Tbird platforms) and not a dimes bit 'o differance in performance or stability.

Later Jim

<font color=blue>Via laughs at mcdonald hamburger eating american pigs</font color=blue> :cool:
 

dmcmahon

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As I said I haven't done it, my "solution" to this problem is to dual boot, I boot into ME which doesn't have the problem whenever I want to run games. It's true that W2K is pretty good about sharing IRQs, and much better than the 9x series. It's certainly good enough for normal operations, which is what I use it for (Office, VC++ and web development). Even for all that, though, I've noticed that there's a bit of "glitchiness" to the sound and video when under stress, i.e. running games under W2K. I attributed this, perhaps incorrectly, to this IRQ sharing issue.
 

ejsmith2

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When you are loading win2k, and it says 'hit f6 for scsi drivers', hit f5 a couple of times instead. It'll take a few more seconds, then come up with a menu with about 6 choices. Select 'standard PC'.
 

dmcmahon

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Well, then, so much for all our deep thoughts about W2K!
First thing to try, disable "Plug and Play OS" in the BIOS. At the same time, be sure to set "Clear Configuration Cache on next boot" to "Yes" so that the BIOS will erase any previous configurations it may have stored. I assume that you have the usual IRQs available and not assigned to legacy devices, i.e. IRQs 11, 10, and 5 are usually available. If you need more than three, disable an unused legacy device (I disabled COM2 to free up IRQ 3), also in the BIOS. Some mobos may allow you to manually assign IRQs at the BIOS level based on the slots your cards are in; you may or may not want to do this (don't know what system you have). When you're satisfied with the BIOS config, bring it back up in ME and see what you get after the BIOS changes. This will probably shuffle things around, though you still might not be happy with the result and may need to reseat some cards to separate certain devices that still seem to be paired. On my system, this occurred initially because I had filled the AGP and then put cards into the PCI slots in sequence. Because of the way my mobo is wired for hardware interrupts, this forced the AGP card to share an interrupt with one of the cards that I had in slots 1 and 2 (I have the A7V133). I corrected this problem by leaving slot 1 blank and moving that card to slot 3.
 

tartarhus

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Its definitely a bad idea to have your sound card and video card sharing the same irq. Just pull out your sound card and put it in different pci slot until you get an ideal irq configuration. Additionally, if you don't use your serial ports or com ports you can disable them in the bios freeing up irqs for your mobo.