IRQ Woes

[Stormblade]

Hey All,

I may have found the problem to my poor system performance. Take a look at this:

http://www.geocities.com/stormblade28/irq.jpg

Can anyone tell me why in the hell Windows put every damn device they could onto one single IRQ? The devices you see there on IRQ 9. Sure everything works ok but I would NEVER have for example put my SCSI RAID controller on the same IRQ with my IDE RAID controller and certainly not my Network card!!!

Oh well, now to find out how to fix this problem. Any suggestions are welcome.

 

[esung]

What MB are you using? it could be the way your cards arranged. certain PCI/AGP slots shared the IRQ.. but your case it's kinda extreme.... but you are already out of IRQs already anyway... maybe you can force your sound card to take IRQ5, which is the only free IRQ as far as I could think.. IRQ 7 is typically use by your printer, and IRQ 12 is your PS/2 connection.

 

[Macro2]

DO you have a voice modem?

 

[Mixxen]

ACPI baby! Take that thing off now...

In win2k you are able to switch from ACPI computer to Standard PC in device manager. But I opted to reinstall win2k...

To install win2k without ACPI, first disable ACPI within the bios...then install the OS.

If you rather not reinstall the OS, you can open device manager and change the "Computer"...

Computer->ACPI PC->Properties->Update Driver->Standard PC

I received a nice performance boost in games especially.

 

[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.

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.

 

[Stormblade]

Thanks guys. I didn't know this. I'm doing a full system backup right now. Soon as it's done though I'll be doing as you all suggested. Things are working but not working the way they should and I suspect its because of the IRQ assignments. Prefferably I'd like my sound card, video capture card, IDE RAID controller and SCSI RAID controller all on seperate IRQs.