compaq bios

[heavymtl]

i have a compaq presario 5000a....it's internals are as follows...566 mhz celeron...192 megs ram (micron)....10 gig seagate u series 5 hard drive....onboard video and sound (sound is ess 1989)...i have also added a sound blaster pci 512 sound card...a hauppauge wintv-go card and a voodoo2 12 meg card....this also has a texas instruments dsl modem....the problem i am running into is that the irq setting in the bios can only be changed to 3 different settings...3...5..11
i can't get it to change to anything else....i aslo see that it has a smb bus..or smbus...i have no idea what that is
i think the motherboard is made by b m w...(sticker says so)...anyway...is there a way to disable the smbus?.....is there any new bios updates for my machine??....i have alot of shared devices in windows and it causes my machine to lock up at times...i am running win98...please help with this...thankyou

[xbradx]

all i can say is good luck....i've got a compaq presario 5710 with a AMD 450 K3, voodoo5 PCI, phillips rhythmic edge sound, etc... i managed to get one bios update from compaq about a year ago, then they basically stopped listing our system on their customer service/firmware update site. as for the sound and video card issues, the only solution i've found is just disabling them from the control panel/system/hardware window. since compaq uses built in sound and video, if you just delete the settings for the built in sound and video without disabling them, the system will look for the drivers for them when you re-boot. since most if not all compaqs use jumpers for their bios settings, there theoretically should be jumpers that you can pull to disable them so they won't interfere with your pci cards, but....so far i've had no luck getting anyone at compaq to send me any documentation on the jumper settings so i can do just that. i've noticed the same thing with the irq settings in the bios, but since they list both of my sound devices(the built in AND the phillips) as just "AUDIO DEVICE" with the same irq, i haven't exactly felt like messing with the settings.
well, this probably hasn't helped any, but just had to vent a little on my own bad PC(at least until i get that new MOBO and processor and leave the world of compaq well behind, except for the case....)

XbradX