Owner`s manual

73
Resolving Interrupt Conflicts
Although there is no way to automatically detect legacy interrupts, Windows
98/Me and some BIOS’s allow you to reserve specific interrupts for legacy use.
Once an interrupt is reserved it will not be assigned by Plug-and-Play to another
card. Or, if you have a PCI card that doesn’t like to share you may be able to
reassign it to a different IRQ.
The first thing to do if you think you have an interrupt conflict is to determine
which interrupt and which card is causing the problem. To do this, right-click on
the My Computer icon on your desktop and select Properties, or go to Start –
Settings – Control Panel and double-click the System icon. In the window that
appears, select the Device Manager tab. Now, highlight Computer, and click the
Properties button. A new window will appear that lists all of the interrupts (IRQs)
that Windows 98/Me recognizes are in use and the cards or resources to which
they are assigned. Write down the interrupts that are listed and the devices that are
assigned to them. Pay particular notice to the interrupt that your Echo card is
assigned to.
Once you know which interrupt your Echo card is trying to use, you need to locate
which card is potentially causing the conflict. To do this you may need to dig out
the manuals for whatever ISA cards are installed and examine the jumper settings
to determine which interrupts, if any, are used. Hopefully, at this point you will
find an offending card that was not listed by Device Manager, but is using an
interrupt that Windows has assigned to another device. If you don’t have any ISA
cards, or your legacy ISA card is not causing the conflict, you should take note of
which PCI card is assigned to the same IRQ as your Echo card.
If you have lost your manuals and are having trouble figuring out which card may
be causing a problem, you can try the brute force approach. Remove all cards from
your system and then re-install them one at a time until the system quits working.
The card that makes the computer stop working correctly will be the one that
needs to be dealt with.
Once the offending card has been identified you have a few different options. One
option is to simply remove the card from your system. However, you’ve likely got
the card in there for a reason, so unless it’s an old sound card you don’t care about
keeping, you’ll probably want to use an approach to remedying the problem that
allows the card to remain in the system.
If the offending card is a legacy ISA card, another option is to change the IRQ on
the card to an IRQ that isn’t currently being used as reported by the Reporter
program. While this may fix the problem at hand, the next time you add another
new Plug-and-Play card you may wind up with another conflict. If you choose this
option it is still a good idea to reserve the IRQ as described below.