I work in a research lab and have aan old win 98se computer that has an expansion card in the pci bus to allow it to control a spectrometer. Anytime the USB is used on this system, it has to be restarted to use the spectrometer or the system will have time out errors. This occurs with usb drives and printers. The USB connection is also extremely slower than any of the other USB 1.1 computers. The card and the USB system use the same IRQ and I'm trying to change that but it won't allow me to change in windows and there is no option to change in the bios. I'm also afraid to try swapping pci slots out of fear that windows might want to reinstall drivers and it mess something up in the software. Is there some way im missing to get windows to change the IRQ? And should I be afraid of switching the pci slot of the card?
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Need Old school 98se help with IRQ's
- Thread starter wvphysics
- Start date
Typicaly a slot will share an IRQ with whatever is plugged into it and a particular on board device. For example whatever is plugged into slot 3 will share it's IRQ with the on board USB controler. So if you have no options on disabling the USB or moving the card to a diffrent slot you may be SOL.
There used to only be 1 or 2 slots that would not share an IRQ, and the rest would be tied to on board devices (Ethernet controler, HD controler, USB, ETC) I also turn off ALL non essential perphrials in the bios even to this day. i.e. old serial ports, and old parallel ports.
A Bios update may help and allow you to see what is sharred and make changes, but they you will be changing the IRQ of both devices
Some motherboard manuals also used to show what was sharred.
You know in some cases the olden days where there was a jumper for the IRQ and base address were better!
There used to only be 1 or 2 slots that would not share an IRQ, and the rest would be tied to on board devices (Ethernet controler, HD controler, USB, ETC) I also turn off ALL non essential perphrials in the bios even to this day. i.e. old serial ports, and old parallel ports.
A Bios update may help and allow you to see what is sharred and make changes, but they you will be changing the IRQ of both devices
Some motherboard manuals also used to show what was sharred.
You know in some cases the olden days where there was a jumper for the IRQ and base address were better!
Mister Natural
2[H]4U
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- Oct 10, 2002
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- 3,441
Yeah when you start wrestling with irq's you're liable to create more work for you than you might like.
In order to manually set irq's in a pre-exisiting win98 system you'll have to disable irq steering in device manager listed under the system category. Then you can go about manually setting irq's but you may have to remove the device, reboot and re-install.
You might wind up with a mess.
Moving a pci card into a different slot may result in a different irq address. That may be the best shot without creating more work than you want. Uninstall the card, shutdown, move card to another slot. Reboot. If you're lucky it'll have a different irq.
In order to manually set irq's in a pre-exisiting win98 system you'll have to disable irq steering in device manager listed under the system category. Then you can go about manually setting irq's but you may have to remove the device, reboot and re-install.
You might wind up with a mess.
Moving a pci card into a different slot may result in a different irq address. That may be the best shot without creating more work than you want. Uninstall the card, shutdown, move card to another slot. Reboot. If you're lucky it'll have a different irq.