Changing IRQ settings in WinXP

[Gardein]

I've recently been having problems with my Gforce FX 5600 graphics card and my SB Audigy sound card sharing the same IRQ. Creative, in their infinite wisdom, say the problem I'm having is from this sharing and that I have to change it, but they dont know how. So...I have a unique situation to this problem. Normally I know the best way to change IRQ settings, in Win XP, is to switch PCI slots that my sound card is in. I am currently using a small shuttle type computer and I only have 1 AGP and 1 PCI slot. IT would seem that somehow changing my IRQs manually is my only option. I did notice that when looking at the resources of devices in my device manager, that there were options to change things that were greyed out. Does anyone know how to activate those, manually change IRQs, or do I have any other options?

[johnnyis42]

when reading the first part of this post, i was thinking "hmm, i wonder if this person is using a SMall Form Factor machine where the only pci slot is bumpped up against the AGP slot."

well, the bad news is that changing the PCI slot is the only way to resolve this issue, in xp, 98, me, or whatever operating system. in the old days of 98 you could change it, but after you reboot it would go right back to where it was before. this is a problem of the motherboard itself, that the expansion slots sit on the same interupt channel. if anything, a bios update or setting within the bios will be your best bet to fix this.

enabling APIC in the bios might help this issue also. however, reinstalling windows and hitting the f-5 key when windows setup is asking for alternate scsi or raid drivers is probably the best way to resolve this. f-6 (not f-6) will bring you to the computer type option menu, where you can choose between the various types of computer you wish to make this install of windows a part of, rather than letting windows detect it. by default windows will see the computer as a standard ACPI compliant computer, either single processor or multiprocessor depending if you have an intel chip with hyperthreadding or not.

at this menu you can choose to install as a "standard x86 compliant" computer. this will not install the ACPI functions, which is what allows windows to handle all your memory address and irq assignments. if you can make any other changes in bios for irq reservations then this form of install will make windows let the bios handle that instead of taking it over and letting acpi handle the settings.

with my experience of sound blaster and audigy creative labs sound cards, reserving irq 5 for legacy isa hardware seemed to do the trick every time. no matter where i put the pci sound card, that setting would force "sound blaster emulation" to irq 5, and then put the rest of the audigy/sound blaster's irq assignment on it's own irq (usually 9 or 10) and then push the video card over to irq 11 or higher (depending on APIC mode)

now, as a final though, before reinstalling windows you might just go into bios and reserve irq 5 for legacy isa hardware if that menu is there, and see if that will fix the problem. sometimes that is all you have to do, in which case you don't have to reinstall windows. give that a shot, and if it works everything should be fine.

me personally, i have totally given up on creative labs sound cards, after reading one of their knowledge base articles that suggested turnning DMA off on your IDE channels in order to clear up sound issyes with their cards. that has to be the absolute worst sugestion for a fix, and leads me to believe that creative labs technicians believe their hardware is the most important piece of hardware in your machine. all the fancy features of a creative labs sound card do not make up for hard drive transfers maxing out around 10 megabytes per second. intel's new sound standard will hopefully take over the audiophile crowd soon anyhow.