HELP! Not enough IRQ's

[Freakout]

I just put together a K6-2 400 on a ASUS P5A motherboard. I have a V3 3000
AGP, SB16 ISA, 33.6 modem ISA. Now when I put the system together I did not
have the printer so when I plug it in and boot up it sais there are no free
IRQ's available, it seams that the Sound card is using the IRQ that the
printer wants to use, and all the other IRQ's are taken up too.

Running Win98

What to do ?



[This message has been edited by Freakout (edited 12-27-1999).]

[Mntsnow]

Well you can disable one or both of your COM ports (if your not using them I did this as I use the PS/2 mouse or you can disable the ps/2 mouse if you use a serial mouse) you can also disable USB ports (again if your not using them) to gain quite a few IRQ's. If you dont use your soundcard in DOS with games that require DOS you can disable the DOS interface of your soundcard and gain that IRQ back too! http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

Mntsnow

[This message has been edited by Mntsnow (edited 12-27-1999).]

[Axel]

To check what's being used where, go into device manager ( start/settings/control panel/system )
and double click on "my computer" at the top of the list to get a good idea of what's using all of your IRQ's up.

[CMonster]

You have received some good advice here. When Plug and play fails: I would just like to add that sometimes a paralell port or some other device will only accept certain IRQs; for example, you may free up IRQ 12 by disabling the PS2 mouse, but find that you cannot assign that IRQ to the paralell port, however, your sound card may accept IRQ 12 and you can assign the old IRQ from the sound card to the paralell port etc. <-- the foregoing was just an example... oh why didn't we ever get a 3rd IRQ controler and have 24 IRQs with 2 cascades..??

..oh yeah, that is why USB was devoloped...

[daveleau]

You may have a difficult time doing IRQ swapping in Win98 since it won't really let you do much manually. You may take the sound card out. Hook up the printer and disable a com port or two or get some USB periferals (mouse, keyboard, modem...etc) and then see what is open after reboot. Reinstall the sound card and it should go into one of the newly freed IRQs. Good luck-Dave

[theCorvetteDoctor]

Kowell p/n 508-E parallel port requires no IRQ. I have one on my picky HP Paviliturd and it works fine, el-cheapo too.