Changing IRQ in Windows 2000

[Chis]

I don't remember where, but I remember seeing that all of my major cards (video, sound, network) and all of my USB ports were on the same IRQ location. I believe this is why sometimes USB devices stop working, sometimes sound stops working, and sometimes my monitor shuts off or the computer freezes. I'd like to know how to move some of these cards to other IRQ locations to stop these problems.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[kmmatney]

It is common to have devices share IRQs. Practically all modern devices have a feature called IRQ sharing, with allows them to share an IRQ with ither devices. To give you an idea, my video card, Via USB driver (2), Sound Card, Network Card, and Via motherboard sound all share IRQ 11. This is pretty common. Pretty much every laptop computer shares many devices across several IRQs.

You can look this up in the control panel/system/Hardware/device Manager, then "view/ resources by connection".

My guess would be that your problems are caused by something else other than IRQ conflicts. Do you have any old legacy devices in your computer?

 

[AndyHui]

Windows 2000 has been installed in ACPI mode and that is how it assigns its plug and play resources. Most people have no problems, other people do have problems. Usually it's all assigned to IRQ9...supposedly it's used as a gateway to virtual IRQs above 15.

If you have no problems, I recommend you leaving the assignments alone.

Anyway, here is the article from Microsoft dealing with it.

If you want to manually assign IRQs, or just let Windows do it properly, you have to change the ACPI mode HAL to Standard PC HAL.

To do this, go into Device Manager, and look under Computer. It should say Advanced Configuration Power Interface PC. Change this to Standard PC by changing the driver. Then reboot. Hopefully it should come out OK.

You may lose the ability for Win2K to shut down properly by itself. If this is the case, you will need to disable the ACPI driver and install the APM driver. I recommend doing a reinstall for full system support.

If you need to reinstall, hit F5 while it is detecting all the devices right at the very beginning to manually select the Standard PC HAL. You may also need to turn ACPI off in the BIOS if you have that option.

 

[Chis]

I can try that. But, does anyone have any idea as to what my problem is? The problems my computer is having are in the first post. I also have another problem: When I close a window (such as an IE window), my mouse cannot click anywhere for about 3-5 seconds. So is this an IRQ problem or is there something else I could try?

Thanks.

 

[Deckard]

Andy, I have a question for you. You seem to have messed with this ACPI business before. What if I install Win2k, hit F5, select the standard HAL, get it all up and decide I want ACPI after all. Can I go into device manager and change the non-ACPI driver to the ACPI driver and get ACPI functionality?

What is happening to me is that my computer won't go into hibernate mode. It starts to, then just comes right back out without any messages. This leads me to believe there is something not quite right with the ACPI configuration. I will try updating the BIOS first. If that doesn't work, then I think I'll ghost my current setup and try reinstalling with the F5 trick to see what happens.

 

[AndyHui]

Deckard: Do you have an SBLive Platinum? If so, there is a bug in Creative's drivers that prevent Win2K from going into Hibernate more properly.

Although the article in the link in my post above explains how to change from Standard PC mode to ACPI mode, it's really best to do a reinstall, as not all of the support for each HAL is completely installed properly when you simply change the driver.