-conflicting advice?
I always assumed it was important for the soundcard to have its own IRQ.
I have a dual boot system which I am upgrading from Win98SE to XP pro. I have just installed XP on one of the OS drives and everything seems fine. Haven’t had a chance to put the whole audio setup throught its paces yet, but I checked out the IRQ configuration in device manger and there are several devices sharing IRQ 5 - my soundcard, network card and the onboard video card.
Interestingly, if I boot to my other OS (still win98se) the soundcard has its own IRQ and the whole IRQ set up is different.
Anyway, I tried to change the IRQ for the soundcard but could not - the option to change from automatic settings was ‘greyed out’ in the resources tab of the properties of the soundcard and I could not alter anything. There didn’t seem to be a away to set a particular IRQ to a particular PCI slot in my bios, and moving the cards around to different a slots would seem to be a waste of time as it seems to be placing all the pci slots under IRQ 5.
…and then I read this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314068/en-us
which seems to be saying that I can’t change IRQ sharing in XP anyway, and shouldn’t bother trying…
OK, so I am confused! Should a soundcard in an XP DAW have its own IRQ, and if so, how do you do it?
Thanks
Does the sound card work? If yes, then don’t mess with it. If no, the only thing you can do is move the card to a different slot. Don’t get too hung up on this. ACPI and Plug and Play are actually to the point where they really work unlike the plug and pray days of the mid to late 90s.
| Quote (Bubbagump @ April 27 2006,08:45) |
| Does the sound card work? If yes, then don't mess with it. If no, the only thing you can do is move the card to a different slot. Don't get too hung up on this. ACPI and Plug and Play are actually to the point where they really work unlike the plug and pray days of the mid to late 90s. |
It seems to work fine, just need to load all my plugins and see if it works properly as a DAW.
Good to know all this sharing stuff is a lot better now though.
thanks B.
You can install XP and force a “Standard PC” install which uses the normal 16 interrupts. There are directions on the web someplace… I would not bother though unless I absolutely ran out of options getting the card to work. ACPI really works pretty darn good.
I know you gotta “run what cha’ brung” but the ideal DAW box (IMO… no flames please) would have an AGP or PCI-X video card, your audio interface and that’s IT. Everything you stuff in a slot gets an interrupt. The best way to avoid PCI buss sharing and IRQ problems is (obviously) to not have any un-needed crapola in there. My main DAW box has AGP video and my EMU card. I have a dual-boot setup and the DAW side of that has all the unused junk disabled. If I need web access to download a driver or whatever, a quick reboot and I’m there. My net adapter is wireless USB so it’s not eating a slot either and the USB Root controller already has an interrupt. With that setup, I use that box for serious DAW’ing or general use with a simple reboot.
D
That’s two strikes! I had a link for optimizing, gone now- sorry! I’m outta here for the moment…
oaf. 