IRQ Conflicts

  • Thread starter Thread starter Steve Stallings
  • Start date Start date
S

Steve Stallings

My 2 year old PC runs Windows 2000 Professional, Office
2000 Professional, and IE 6.0. All of these are kept up
to date with current downloaded patches. I also have a
firewall and current NAV for protection. However,
something has been causing my computer to operate
irratically for the past couple of months. Calls to
Microsoft have netted only temporary, partial fixes.

I now have a situation where, upon start-up, I get blue
screens indicating possible hardware conflicts,
installation problems, etc. where there shouldn't be any.
I was in the administrative tools, syetem tools, system
information, hardware resources, and happened to run a
Conflicts/Sharing update out of curiosity. It indicated
that I had three devices trying to share IRQ 9. I
confirmed this in the Device Manager, but I could not find
a utility to allow me to manually force an IRQ assignment
to eliminate the conflict.

My response time continued to degrade, usually a precursor
to a blue screen, so I did a restart. When I want back to
this same location, I now had 6 devices all on IRQ 9.
Juast as a test, I did another restart, and I now have
seven devices trying to share IRQ 9.

I don't have any idea why this would be happening, or if
this is the cause, or a symptom of my recent problems, but
I do know it AIN'T right. Unfortunately, I still can't
find a manual IRQ override, even though I remember that I
used to have do do this (back in the DOS days) to manually
install game controller and other added hardware.

Can anyone help me fix this, and suggest a way to avoid it
in the future. I have no idea how or why the IRQs would
ever change, once originally established without conflicts.
Thanks, Steve
 
I believe the multiple devices using one IRQ is a function of ACPI and IRQ
steering in Win2K. I also had a situation where IRQ sharing was a problem
and found this solution:

In device manager, open the 'Computer' tree, and it should probably say ACPI
Uniprocessor PC. Change this to 'Standard PC' by double clicking ACPI
Uniprocessor PC, and click "Update Driver..." under the Drivers tab. In the
wizard that follows, select "Display a list...", hit Next, then select "Show
all hardware of this device class". From this selection, when [Standard
computers] is selected for Manufacturers, select "Standard PC" from the list
on the right. You will need to reboot and Windows will probably re-find all
of your hardware again, so you may need driver disks.

After changing this driver, as I recall, you will be able to choose IRQ's
and resources for your hardware.

Good Luck!
-CC
 
CC's advice is doubtless good, but I have a hunch this might also be
hardware-related. Something may be failing. If there are no indications
of problems in Event Viewer or in Device Manager, I'd be inclined to
guess that maybe a disk or its controller is having problems, and
possibly important system files and/or drivers are being corrupted as
they move across the mainboard/drive interface. Such failures can be
very gradual (months) but probabilities are they'll worsen. Take
appropriate backup measures. You might also try running a Repair.
 
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