Help out a Win2000 Newbie, ACPI info needed

[Hard_Boiled]

Is it just me or does ACPI suck? I finally got around to installing Win2000, and lo and behold, it stuck practically everything on IRQ 9. My Geforce, SB Live, SCSI card, and USB controller are all on IRQ 9, as well as the ACPI-Compliant system, whatever that is. So whats the deal? When my computer boots up it says my SCSI card is on IRQ 15, and I have a ton of free interrupts. Everything appears to work fine, but I'd rather all these devices have their own IRQ since it should be possible. So can anyone help me out with any friendly advice on how to take care of this and why I think ACPI is the main culprit?

BTW, is it a bad thing to use ISA cards in Win2000, some friend of mine makes this claim but I have an Etherlink III ISA network card. Seems to work fine, but is there any truth that it may make my system slower than a PCI NIC would? Thanks to anyone who can respond, I'm just now learning Win2000 and any help is appreciated.

System:
Asus P3B-F BX board
PIII 850
Geforce 2 GTS
SB Live
Tekram DC-390U2W SCSI card
SCSI hard drive and cd-readers, no IDE components, IDE, serial, and parallel ports disabled in bios.
3COM Etherlink III ISA NIC(old)

 

[resinboy]

I can only give you my experience, so here goes. Windows 2K basically says" 90% of equipment nowadays is able to share IRQ's, so deal with it". I freaked the first time I noticed the IRQ ditribution, but my system runs fine. Remember, it almost always comes down to DRIVERS.
Here is a MS link that deals with it :LINK

 

[AndyHui]

Here we go again....a copy and paste from my other responses:

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.

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.

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.

 

[Hard_Boiled]

Thanks for the link, helped alot. I also did some searching after I posted my question, seems a lot of people just deal with it and it works fine. I must say so far I'm impressed with Win2K. A few things annoyed me(things like windows explorer and calling network neighborhood "my network places&quot, but it seemed faster and when I ran Half-Life things seemed smoother than when I used Win98. I had always heard OpenGL games ran great in WinNT, so I guess I expected as much.

Next step: get Win2000 server running and play around with that!

 

You can go into device manager, under compter heading and you will see ACPI, you can update the driver to "Standard PC", just like installing any other device.
But not all devices on the computer are supported in this mode.
When you install it, it will reboot and reinstall all of your devices, from chipset to USB.
I have done this and I see much gain over ACPI.
All depends on your system as well.