Some time back, somebody posted here about slow boot on a machine
with a Realtek 10/100 ntwork card.  That got my attention, because I
had recently upgraded a machine and been disappointed by its slow
boot.  I had attributed the problem to some unspecified video driver
issue, but realized that the machine also included a Realtek 10 Mbps
"combo" (UTP/co-ax) network card.

  After a bit of digging, I've realized that the network card and the
video card are trying to use the same IRQ -- which works fine, except
that it appeares that it takes Windows a couple of minutes to sort it
out.

  The simple fix would, I think, be to move the network card to
another PCI slot....

  In the case I have here, all the PCI slots are full and contain ITQ-
using devices.  Also, all IRQs are in use....
  My plan is to consolidate some partitions and remove the second
hard drive, and move the CD-ROM drive to be slave, so I can disable
the secondary EIDE channel.  This should free up one of the two
highest IRQs for the SCSI controller, in turn making an IRQ available
for the network card so it will no longer have to share.

  [My original theory was that the network was configured to obtain
TCP/IP settings from a DHCP server, and pausing (and eventually
timing out) when it couldn't find one.  That turned out not to be the
case for me.]

David G

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