[brainnet]

WIn2k sets all my expansion cards under the same irq.. 11 ( AGP, SOund, and NIC )..
and i can't manually change it. I have lots or free irq's. I have even disabled my Coms ports, but seems that the only win2k is interested is 11.
I have dual boot, and win98se have all my cards on dif irqs.. ANy ideas how to solve that?

[pr-man]

There is nothing wrong with that it just means that your system and Win2k are running in ACPI mode and if everything is working then it is successfully doing it. Which in itself nowadays is a great feat

[brainnet]

SO there is no impact in video performance ??
i mean sharing the AGP irq with the other cards? ?

[FrogMaster]

ACPI is doing the job to properly allocate harware irqs in the background.
Don't bother, it is perfectly normal

[còpaííuk]

My Matrox G400 uses Bus mastering and, according to their tech people, it requires dedicated IRQ.

Is there any way to adjust it?
Maybe somewhere in the registry?

[FrogMaster]

Plz everybody stop bothering with this irq story if you have an Intel chipset:
- ACPI allocates irqs as it likes to and you cannot interfere with.
- Having one thousand add-ons cards reported as sharing the same irq (W2K's favourites seems to be 9 and 11) does not matter at all!!!
- You may even find that your harware uses fancy irqs like 68, 75, 138, ... just don't care.
The os is there to do the job of properly allocating resources.
There are so many posts about this pseudo-prob I'm getting mad.
Win2k does the job. Period.
Is this so difficult to understand?

[Mr Furious]

Fine, fine. I agree with the adage "if its not broken don't fix it" as you say, but I've had loads of problems with various PCs running 95 98 and 2K with ACPI and IRQ sharing. Often the only course of action is to move PCI cards around into different slots to change how ACPI assigns the IRQs. The fact that the IRQ sharing is SUPPOSED to work doesn't mean that it DOES work does it? I'm not saying we should return to jumpers, but more control for the advanced used would be nice.

[FrogMaster]

You are right Furious
Some people have probs because they believe that all pci slots are born equal.
On a standard mobo, at least three pci slots do share hardware resources.
One shares with agp,
Another one shares with isa,
Another one may well share with ata 66.
This means it is not an os issue but a mere hardware one.
Also the bios is there to help freeing resources.
For example, if you do not use serial ports (you have cable or dsl), just disable them in the bios.
If your printer is networked, disable irq 7.
If you don't use usb, disable it in the bios.
If some add-on card is nervous about the irq it uses, allocate it in the bios.
Help the os and it will do the job more easily.