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IRQ allocation in Win2K

  • Thread starter Thread starter AC
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AC

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Is it normal to have all devices sharing a single IRQ (IRQ11) while the rest are free to use?

If not, how do I change them? (This is Win2K).
 
I have my sound,nic,and usb hubs all sharing IRQ 11 and when I scroll on a webpage,I hear noise from my speakers coinciding with the movement on the scroll slider bar. That is the only anomaly I have seen,yet everything is detected ok and seems to work OK.
 
I did a complete reinstall with ACPI off about a week ago. Now my system has a little more pep. Before that, the game Alice had multiple slowdowns when there was a lot of action (textures), but now it runs silky smooth. I couldn't believe it! I still need to test some other games which I haven't installed yet, particularly Giants, which ran like crap with ACPI.
 
You don't have to reinstall to fix this! Hang tite for second. /me goes to look something up...

[edit] OK, here you go. Go into the device manager, and under "Computer" should be something with 'ACPI' in its name. Get the properties for that device, go to the Drivers tab, and change/update the driver. Find your way to the complete list of Windows drivers, and use the driver "Standard PC" under "(Standard computers)".

This will cure your ACPI ills, but it will cost you your power management functions!
 
awesome heads up killbat, all i've heard from people is the reinstall method...


so there is no way to change irqs without losing APM? not even a registry hack?

 
For some reason I think I've heard of people killing ACPI and keeping power management, but then again maybe I'm crazy. You can still set HDD poweroff times and such in the BIOS...
 
NFS4s impressive list:

11 NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS/GeForce2 Pro
11 VIA USB Universal Host Controller
11 VIA USB Universal Host Controller
11 Hauppauge Win/TV 878/9 VFW Video Driver
11 Hauppauge Win/TV 878/9 VFW Audio Driver
11 Creative SB Live! (WDM)
11 Conexant SoftK56 PCI Modem(M)
11 NETGEAR FA310TX Fast Ethernet Adapter (NGRPCI)
11 Symphony Cordless PCI Network Adapter
11 HPT370 UDMA/ATA100 RAID Controller

He's got 10, I've only got 9 🙁

Voodoo3
2x VIA USB Universal Host Controller
2x ATi TV-Wonder (Audio/Video)
SB Live!
Linksys NIC
Promise Ultra100
Hollywood Plus

Yes it's perfectly normal.
You can disable it if you want, but if it works then dont' worry about it.
 
Disable ACPI!

Under Windows 2000 you can disable ACPI from within Windows as follows:
[*]Go to Device Manager and select Computer -> Properties of ACPI PC
[*]Click the driver Tab and choose Update Driver
[*]When the wizard gets to the "What do you want the wizard to do?" page select "Display a list of the known drivers..."
[*]Then "Show all hardware of this device class"
[*]Then select "Standard PC"
[*]Reboot the machine
[*]When Windows 2000 restarts it'll redetect most of the hardware in your machine again and reassign IRQ's to them, turning off ACPI.
Note: If you installed Windows with ACPI enabled in the BIOS, and then you disable ACPI using the BIOS, you may need to do a fresh install of Windows!
 
You cannot change the IRQ settings with ACPI on..."this is a feature not a bug" apparently. After disabling ACPI to Standard PC, you can enable APM by installing "NT Apm/Legacy Support". ACPI and APM are different power managements. Also you will still have hibernation available, but you may loose StandBy.

There is another thread on how to do this somewhere. I opted to reinstall my OS since it was "about that time" again.
 


<< You will get a huge performance increase if you disable ACPI. >>


Looking at Sisoft Sandra performance, my system (Duron 952/Abit KT7A-RAID) is right in line if not faster than a PIII 1GHz on an i820 board so I'm not sweatin performance. It can't be that big of a difference.
 
Actually, NFS4, depending on your system I suppose, it can be a huge difference. I remember the ACPI days, &quot;WTF! Why is this game running so slow!&quot;. It seemed like my computer had a brick tied to its balls. :Q
 
I did notice a big difference in the game Alice which has lots of textures. I'm sure other games will benefit as well.
 
Hmmm, maybe when I reinstall without ACPI when my second Expert 27 gets here for some RAID actoin 🙂
 
ok, does ACPI force windows to allocate a single IRQ to all devices or is this a side effect?

if i understand correctly, changing to standard pc will force windows to redetect the devices and reallocate resources to them...

this sounds a lot like the different IRQ Steering tables in Win9X...

is it the driver or just a setting in the registry (like win9x) that causes windows to reallocate resources according to a different table?
 
Yes, upon reboot all your devices will be redetected...so have all your drivers ready.

The irq sharing with ACPI is done by design and the nature of ACPI. You can read more about it here...

here
and here
 
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