Can I take my computer for a spin without steering?

[jambin]

I was checking out my devices and their irq's recently and noticed that their are several irq's for pci steering. What are these , and can I free them up or something?

[Richard_Cranium72]

Free them up,,? For what, are you adding something that requires a IRQ that windows will not assign on it's own.. Are you running Win98? DrVette

[RobRich]

Depending on the system configuration, you can possibley disable IRQ steering. I do because my VIA MVP3 based motherboard has a slight hatred for VIA IRQ miniport driver, so I just drop IRQ steering altogether. It's listed in the device manager, under the PCI bus properties entry.

The question is why disable IRQ steering? Unless it causes you problems, it is a good thing to have. It does occupy an IRQ in a general sense, but the IRQ it possess is open for hardware still. PCI steering justs shares the IRQ for exactly what it says, to control the allocation of IRQ's. Check out the device manager entry I listed above, and see if PCI steering is being loaded correctly. If so, then leave it alone. If not, and you have a VIA chipset board, download the VIA 4-in-1 drivers and install them. That should solve any probs, but if PCI steering is still not right, just disable it completely. Your system should run without any problems.