sluggish P3 800 b/c of IRQ problems in Win 2k

[Alansan]

I have a p3 800, Abit bx133 raid, 128mb ram, usr hardware modem, diamond mx400, an adaptec scsi card and an IBM deskstar ata/100 30 gig. In windows, it is really sluggish. When I open up notepad, the computer boggs down. It takes about 6 seconds to open the start menu. CPU usage in task manager fluctuates from 0 to 100 all the time with me doing nothing. This is seriously not right. Alot of the IRQs are set to 11 in device manager for some reason. Does anyone know whats wrong? Thanks for your help.

 

[AC]

Try disabling "IRQ Steering" in "Device Manger" >> "System Devices" >> "PCI Bus" >> "IRQ Steering". You may also need to specify PCI IRQ settings in the BIOS setup, since Windows isn't managing them correctly.

That's probably the source of your problems.

Do you have a lot of programs loading on startup? You can disable them by using "msconfig.exe"(type that in the "run" box) >> "startup".

Hope that helps.

 

[AndyHui]

AC: the resolutions you have mentioned only work in Win9x, not Win2K.

Alansan: Win2K has been installed with the ACPI HAL (Advanced Configuration Power Interface Hardware Abstraction Layer) which controls your system devices and resources, 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.

128MB of RAM is a little light to be running Win2K. You will see a significant boost with more than 128MB of RAM.