Shared IRQ issue.

[OliverP]

Ok, i just recently went to win2k and the following has occurred:

My video card, sound card, AND my nic ALL share irq 11.

hmm... I had this issue at one time with 98SE and followed all advice and help out there and was able to manually set nic to irq 4 and sound to irq 7 or 9 or something. I did it in BIOS. sooo.. with that said, I tried all the various ways to do so, but 2k doesnt seem to care what BIOS says... it appears there's no way to override the ACPI or whatever??!

My mobo is the abit kt7-RAID (all cards are in their recommended slots). and this is Win2k Pro.

this sucks...
any ideas?

 

[MiniMe69]

dude it doesn't matter anymore...IRQ Holder for PCI Steering. Or else u can try changing the BIOS to PNP OS = NO...Manual Configuration = YES

 

[jaywallen]

OliverP,

I don't understand. Why does it suck? Go here and search on the keywords "PCI Bus IRQ Sharing". It sounds as though your system is just doing exactly what it's supposed to do under this OS. Are you having functional issues with any of your devices?

Regards,
Jim

 

[OliverP]

hmm.. i guess my fears lie in my experience with 98SE whereas I DID have a performance problem with my NIC before I switched it's interupt.. through further reading, i see you may be correct. there is perhaps no performance hit.

my fear was that my NIC is slightly slower because since I installed 2k, my ping times are very high compared to 98se... hmmm.. (my tracert's became uggggly).

I just ran the speed tweak for 2k and that lowered them some... so i hope you're right when you say 2k is different (better) when it comes to shared irq...

thanks.

 

[jaywallen]

Well, W2K is definitely better at ACPI and IRQ sharing than Win98SE was, but not all the device drivers provided by the various vendors for W2K are solid yet. I only used Win9X (Win98SE) for a few months, and that was 2 years after it was released. At that point in time, some new (as in newly released) devices I got were delivered with drivers which were not yet Win98SE compliant! If your experience parallels mine, you'll see system performance improve over time as you update the BIOS and device drivers. Of course, if you have real problems with a device driver in W2K, you'll likely see blue screens. W2K is very nasty about bad drivers. One bad one can affect the performance of the entire system as W2K tries to deal with it in the background. Are you getting any telltale error messages in your Event Viewer?

BTW, were the tweaks you employed specific for W2K or generalized tweaks? You might see a big difference between speeds among local and WAN connections. W2K is SLOW in communicating with Win9X boxes, and some ISPs haven't optimized for W2K's characteristics. As a matter of fact, when W2K was first released some users had trouble getting any connection at all with their ISPs.

I hope you'll be able to get your ping times and tracert times into the happy zone!

Regards,
Jim

 

[Joony]

I got mine working by changing from ACPI to standard PC in system properties....

 

[OliverP]

huh? in system properties? specifically where did you switch to standard PC? and i dotn want to do this if it will cause win2k to perform worse overall.. hmmm

 

I switched from ACPI to Standard PC and I have NOTHING to say but GOOD things about it.
Im sorry, but sharing IRQs to that extent is beyond what the hardware and software of today can handle. There is no way any OS can cleanly handle that many CPU calls by resource intensive devices.
In Device manager click on the + next to computer and you should see ACPI, highlight, props, update driver, and im pretty sure if your using a computer you can search the list for "standard PC".
And you must, I repeat MUST have all of the drivers for your chipset and all your devices, windows will completely reinstll every device.

 

[jaywallen]

Seems to do okay on all of my systems. And for those who use notebook computers, for whom advanced power management features are very important, it's the only way to fly. ACPI and IRQ Sharing are where it's at, as far as I'm concerned.

Regards,
Jim

 

[like2be]

Sammyson, havin some stability problems and I think it's because the Video and sound cards are sharing IRQ9 along with everything else in W2K on my computer. Could you go over the instructions again on how to switch from
ACPI to Standard PC. I'm lost at the point after finding ACPI under computer in device manager. Doe this also allow one to change the IRQ's and keep them unique. Thanks for the help. My system:Athlon TB 1gig/A7V/AsusV7700/Soundblaster 5.1/Acer56x CD-R/HP9100 CD-RW/ Something in this list is giving me a headache...

 

[OliverP]

yeah brom i must agree, your intructions are way vague...

i look under Device manager, and under "systm devices" I have two ACPI mentionings... the first is "ACPI Fixed Feature Button" and the second is "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System."

Not if I go to update either driver, and do a search, the onyl compatible is the one already given.. but if I list all devices, I see nothing called "Standard PC" for anything... except perhaps Standard PCI-to-PCI bridge and similar...

So, if you would be completely obliged, I think this is html worthy.. perhaps posta howto here or in some webspace? let us know, please.

thanks so far... still willing to try it.