Hi all,

I have a real puzzle going on here and I need advice/help. I have a dual
boot system, Win98SE and Win2k. The machine is a Dell Dimension 4100:
P3-866, 256K RAM, 32M DDR Radeon graphics, DVD, CDRW, 40G ATA/100 HD,
internal modem, ATI TV-Wonder TV tuner, SB Live value sound card, Ethernet
NIC and a Phonelink NIC. All my PCI slots are now full, and my Radeon sits
in a dedicated AGP slot.

When this machine was only booting to Win98, I spent a lot of time
rearranging cards etc to try and get as little IRQ sharing as possible. With
all PCI slots and my AGP slot full, it was impossible to get all devices on
unique IRQs but I did my best. I especially wanted to get my graphics card,
sound card and Ethernet NIC on separate interrupts, but didn't care so much
if others were sharing.

Now that I am using Win2k as my main engine, and boot to it, I have been
having some Win2k freezeups and some BSOD's. Some of the BSOD's give no
information at all, but some suggest that the problem is my video card
driver. I thought this was supposed to be thing of the past with Win2k. I
wondered if maybe I was getting some conflict/sharing problems so I checked
my system info for IRQ assignments etc and found, to my horror that Win2k is
essentially assigning ALL my devices to the SAME IRQ!!!

Here is a printout of my IRQ list:

System Information report written at: 02/14/2001 08:37:00 AM
[IRQs]

IRQ Number      Device
9       Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System
9       Video Controller (VGA Compatible)
9       ATI TV Wonder BtCap, WDM Video Capture
9       Network Everywhere Fast Ethernet Adapter(NC100 v2)
9       Creative SB Live! Value (WDM)
9       D-Link DHN-520 10Mb Home Phoneline NIC
9       MDP3880-W(U) PCI Modem
9       Intel(R) 82801BA/BAM USB Universal Host Controller - 2442
9       Intel(R) 82801BA/BAM SMBus Controller - 2443
3       ATI TV Wonder BtCap, WDM Audio Capture
8       System CMOS/real time clock
13      Numeric data processor
12      Microsoft PS/2 Port Mouse (IntelliPoint)
1       Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard
6       Standard floppy disk controller
4       Communications Port (COM1)
14      Ultra ATA Channel
15      Ultra ATA Channel

Holy Moly!!

I went in last night and started to do the PCI-card shuffle to see if I
could clear some of this log-jam, and while I certainly did not try all
possible permutations and combinations, the few I tried all yielded the SAME
result - EVERYTHING that I have added as a board is being assigned to IRQ 9.

My obvious questions: is this normal for Win2k?? Does Win2k have enough
oomph to really be able to manage all those IRQ contentions? Is there some
way I can move any of these devices to other IRQ's? How do they get assigned
in the first place, etc. etc.

All help and advice eagerly sought. Or should I just relax and let Win2k
handle all of this?

Michael

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