XP and EISA question

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certolnut

Hi all

I've bought a Soyo motherboard that supports a pentium 4 chip and has ISA
slots (amazingly SOYO still supports this)

I've got an ISA interface card that goes with our gas chromatograph at our
office, unfortunately, it doesn't appear to work with windows XP. It WAS
working fine with windows 98 on a separate machine.

The card has a simple configuration, just use a open I/O port between 300H
AND 360H and an available IRQ line( 4, I've disabled all of the COMM ports
and LPT ports)

I thought at first I had an IRQ or IO address conflict, but after inspecting
all of the data in the hardware manager and MSINFO32.EXE, I'm convinced that
I don't.

Has XP discontinued support for LEGACY ISA? Is there a problem with the I/O
Ports that I'm using?

any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I hope to GOD, that I don't have to revert back to WIN 98 or buy a bunch of
new equipment.
 
XP continues support for legacy ISA devices. I believe that it doesn't
auto-install PnP ISA devices, but you can install them manually. It's
inconvenient, but it can work.

I used to have a legacy ISA SCSI card ("Zip Zoom", really an old Adaptec
product). XP included suitable drivers for it, but I had to run through the
hardware installation wizard and finish with a manual installation. I may
have had to reserve an IRQ for the card (legacy ISA, IRQ set by jumper) in
the mainboard's BIOS. This was on a PIII system; I didn't know that there
were any P4s with ISA slots.

I hope that you have XP drivers for your card. If so, it's likely that
you'll be able to get it working.


Address scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.
 
WinXP does support legacy EISA slots and ISA boards - providing you have the
drivers. EISA are not Plug 'n Pray, so you need to install the drivers that
are compatible with the chipset.

I have several older Abit motherboards with EISA slots and ISA modem cards
and they work just fine. I couldn't find the motherboard on SOYO's site
that supports EISA with a Pentium 4 so I could check the KB. But obviously
they do - do you have updated program and/or drivers for your ISA board? If
not, maybe the program can be run using Win98 compatibility mode under XP.

Find the .exe program file for your gas chromatograph program, right-click >
Properties > Compatibility and select Win98 and give it a try. Also check
the manufactures site for updates.

Bob S.
 
check the bios PNP section. There is often a way to reserve / indicate that
an irq is not for PNP and to remove it from that 'pool'.

So, have a ferret around in the BIOS to see if the IRQ can be reserved.
Without the card / drivers it should be listed as unused.

Many bios (I m thinking cheap desktop mass produced, low cost PC's - cow box
machines) are so poorly written that they won't release IRQ's even if the
onboard device is disabled. Check for BIOS updates, or if the card will let
you try another IRQ.
 
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