I'm running WIN2K with the following hardware.
ASUS A7M266-D
2x Athlon XP 1700+
ATI Radeon 8500DV
3Com 3CR990-TX-97
I currently have my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz and USB 2.0 PCI card disconnected, and my serial and parallel ports disabled, because I thought it was a simple IRQ conflict problem, but this is about the bare minimum and I'm still having problems. I thought disabling ACPI would help like in the past, but no luck this time. For some reason I can't hardcode the IRQs in the BIOS -- Windows keeps overriding them with virtual IRQs (i.e. 20, 24, 32, 128). Some of the IRQs used to be shared, but right now every device has a unique IRQ on boot up and to the best of my knowledge in Windows as well, but who knows with the virtual IRQs.
Some symptoms:
- LAN connection always says its connected but every now and then my ethernet would crap out and I would need to either reboot Windows or manually disable and re-enable the LAN connection via Network and Dial-Up Connections. In the past, when I tried re-enabling the connection, it would blue screen but now it seems to re-enable fine. Still, the random network failures is annoying. This happened to my old Linksys card a year ago but I temporarily fixed it by getting a new network card. The only clue I have is in Event Viewer, it says Adapter: Microcode Dead every couple seconds or something to that effect. I don't think the network card is faulty, or is it?
- The lockups used to be different (with Win2K, computer would kinda freeze, but mouse would work, but as soon as I click the mouse it would freeze completely, but with WinXP it would blue screen and say something about infinite loop and report an ATI driver file) and they seemed to be caused by my ATI card (other people with similar problems, albeit with nVidia cards and not ATI, fixed their problem by changing aperture size and updating their drivers but neither approach helped any for me) but now its all reduced down to IRQ_NOT_EQUAL_OR_LESS BSODs. The error code was 0x000000D1 (0x<something here>, 0x00000002 (so IRQ 2?), 0x0000000 (sometimes 0x00000001, so both read and write), 0xBDFE77xx). The computer never used to do BSOD, but now it will do this even when nothing is being done on the computer. I can boot it up, and leave it sitting and within minutes (or sometimes if I'm lucky I can play 30 mins of some game) it will BSOD.
- Sometimes when Windows starts up, Device Manager will say my network card failed to start or it say it detected new hardware (my santa cruz or my ethernet card) even though they've been installed perfectly fine.
- A minor and unrelated problem is the game port on my Santa Cruz always reports lack of resources and none of the available memory location settings report as being free when I try to manually configure the resources for it.
If I install my Sound Card and USB card back in and have them sharing IRQs (this is almost inevitable as I only have 3 uniquely IRQed PCI slots with my ASUS board, and even then when I install the USB, it branches out and claims two of the other IRQs... for instance, as reported on boot up, network card on 10, sound card on 5, agp on 11, usb on 9, 10 and 11), the network failures happen even more frequently. Also of note is even though my duallie system used to crash, it was only once every couple days at max. But then the network failures came up and I tried to fix it by unsharing the IRQs (seemed to help a little bit) and now I get BSODs as well. Some of the information, like when certain problems started, may be inaccurate as I've reinstalled Windows so many times now and with so many different slot setups and combinations.
Any help much appreciated! If I can't fix it, I might just have to turn to the dark side and get a P4 cpu and mobo =)
ASUS A7M266-D
2x Athlon XP 1700+
ATI Radeon 8500DV
3Com 3CR990-TX-97
I currently have my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz and USB 2.0 PCI card disconnected, and my serial and parallel ports disabled, because I thought it was a simple IRQ conflict problem, but this is about the bare minimum and I'm still having problems. I thought disabling ACPI would help like in the past, but no luck this time. For some reason I can't hardcode the IRQs in the BIOS -- Windows keeps overriding them with virtual IRQs (i.e. 20, 24, 32, 128). Some of the IRQs used to be shared, but right now every device has a unique IRQ on boot up and to the best of my knowledge in Windows as well, but who knows with the virtual IRQs.
Some symptoms:
- LAN connection always says its connected but every now and then my ethernet would crap out and I would need to either reboot Windows or manually disable and re-enable the LAN connection via Network and Dial-Up Connections. In the past, when I tried re-enabling the connection, it would blue screen but now it seems to re-enable fine. Still, the random network failures is annoying. This happened to my old Linksys card a year ago but I temporarily fixed it by getting a new network card. The only clue I have is in Event Viewer, it says Adapter: Microcode Dead every couple seconds or something to that effect. I don't think the network card is faulty, or is it?
- The lockups used to be different (with Win2K, computer would kinda freeze, but mouse would work, but as soon as I click the mouse it would freeze completely, but with WinXP it would blue screen and say something about infinite loop and report an ATI driver file) and they seemed to be caused by my ATI card (other people with similar problems, albeit with nVidia cards and not ATI, fixed their problem by changing aperture size and updating their drivers but neither approach helped any for me) but now its all reduced down to IRQ_NOT_EQUAL_OR_LESS BSODs. The error code was 0x000000D1 (0x<something here>, 0x00000002 (so IRQ 2?), 0x0000000 (sometimes 0x00000001, so both read and write), 0xBDFE77xx). The computer never used to do BSOD, but now it will do this even when nothing is being done on the computer. I can boot it up, and leave it sitting and within minutes (or sometimes if I'm lucky I can play 30 mins of some game) it will BSOD.
- Sometimes when Windows starts up, Device Manager will say my network card failed to start or it say it detected new hardware (my santa cruz or my ethernet card) even though they've been installed perfectly fine.
- A minor and unrelated problem is the game port on my Santa Cruz always reports lack of resources and none of the available memory location settings report as being free when I try to manually configure the resources for it.
If I install my Sound Card and USB card back in and have them sharing IRQs (this is almost inevitable as I only have 3 uniquely IRQed PCI slots with my ASUS board, and even then when I install the USB, it branches out and claims two of the other IRQs... for instance, as reported on boot up, network card on 10, sound card on 5, agp on 11, usb on 9, 10 and 11), the network failures happen even more frequently. Also of note is even though my duallie system used to crash, it was only once every couple days at max. But then the network failures came up and I tried to fix it by unsharing the IRQs (seemed to help a little bit) and now I get BSODs as well. Some of the information, like when certain problems started, may be inaccurate as I've reinstalled Windows so many times now and with so many different slot setups and combinations.
Any help much appreciated! If I can't fix it, I might just have to turn to the dark side and get a P4 cpu and mobo =)