"An IRQ setting question for ALL the OLD SKOOL TECHIES!"

[DarkFudge2000]

I am currently running a PIII 550 overclocked to 800mhz on the Asus Pv4x Apollo 133 chipset and Win98 SE. I am also running a Sound Blaster Live! original version ( the one with the 2nd add on card for all the digital stuff) Also I am running a Netgear 310TX 10/100 NIC, a RAZER BoomSlang USB mouse and finally a set of MIDILAND 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround Sound Speakers that plug directly into the Digit SP/DIF output of the SB Live!

Ok here's my simple problem....I have been noticing that the sound on my speakers has been intermittantly pausing and skipping when I play any videos, DVD movies, and music. Its almost as if it were like a cache hiccup or a CPU polling that seems to cause this sudden break every so often. After playing with all my settings and reinstalling my SoundBlaster Live! 2.0 drivers, scandisking, defragging my HD and cleaning all my TEMP files out, ect. ect. for the last 2 days I have gotten no where until I just recently discovered that my Sound Card seems to be sharing an IRQ with my USB Mouse driver in system properties under USB ROOT HUB I am now wondering if 2 devices can share the same IRQ???.....In the Windows drivers section under each of these properties the first thing i looked for was a reported conflict by windows but Windows says that this driver is working properly....So my question is now is there a way to FORCE devices to different IRQs??....When I try to UNSELECT the checkbox for AUTOMATIC SETTINGS in the driver tab under system properties...it will allow me to change the Memory address below the IRQ field but whenever I try to change the actual IRQ it states that this is unable to be Edited or something......I am really getting so nervous that I may never get this to work right...Can someone suggest a way I can force different IRQ settings for certain devices or just isolate an IRQ to only use 1 specific device?...in this case my sound card?.....I just want it to be the only device using an IRQ.....and do you think that my sound pauses, dropouts and skips may be from some sort of IRQ or address collision , network or CPU polling that Windows is just not reporting???

 

[Intergalactic]

To test your theory of IRQ problems you could uninstall the sound card, and then move the card to a new slot on your MB, reinstall, and see if your problem still exists, I actually had a similar problem with my NIC card, conflicting with my ATA 100 controler, and I have the same NIC Card as you, try moving some stuff around see where that gets you.

 

[dman]

PCI Cards are supposed to, in theory, NOT have IRQ Conflicts. In fact, if the drivers and OS were written correctly, you would not have IRQ Conflicts. The problem arrises from buggy drivers and the workarounds are generally to move cards into different slots. Sound Blaster Live is a very popular sound card... which may or may not be the reason it is very often listed as causing problems with other PCI Devices. I suspect the drivers myself.

The Live uses multiple IRQ's and one thing you can do is disable the Legacy SB Emulation device. It uses CPU Resources and reserves IRQ's and is useless UNLESS you play dos games in Windows. Disabling it probably won't help much, but it certainly won't hurt to try it.

You can also try swapping some of the PCI Settings in your CMOS. In my MSI K7T PRo2a My Linksys PCI KNE100TX Network card would not transfer data unless I disable the Delayed Transaction and Master 0 WS Write values. (Actually, I think it's just the 0 WS Write value that is causing the problem, but, haven't tried enabling the Delayed transaction again yet...)

There are other things you can do for reserving IRQ's like disabling PnP and setting things manually in the CMOS but I'd really look into that ONLY as a last resort. In fact, I'd probably get rid of an adapter before messing around with manual IRQ's.

I miss the days when I could set the IRQ's myself and tell the OS where things were. Sure, it wasn't "simple" to set up but it sure as hell was easy to fix problems if there was an IRQ conflict.