IRQ REservations? | Forums

[LuckyBoy1]

JetbuffDude's post got me stinking again (my waste can be a terrible thing to mind) about my plans to try and tweak my IRQ assignments. I've got Cousin Billy's XP Homely Edition and from everything I've read, it decides what to put where as far as IRQ assigments. Then a couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with a technical support guy from Audigy and he told me that my bios default setting that has IRQ 3 "reserved" should be changed to available because my lil'puter doesn't need it reserved. His idea was that it was reserved for older systems that needed it and that mine didn't need it reserved. He said that changing it now wouldn't change anything for the better, but would make it part of the mix when I next reformatted. I enabled it in the bios just after I got off the phone with him and decided that when (I hope I don't die of old age first) the patch comes out, I'd make a clean start of everything again and hope having IRQ 3 available will help spread the load. Does anyone see any problems with this idea?

Solutions for internet security & spyware problems... http://www.geocities.com/callingelvis911/s_s.html

Luckyboy = Senior hydraulic landing gear designer for the P-11 & Contributing Editor to Complete Users magazine.

[LuckyBoy1]

JetbuffDude's post got me stinking again (my waste can be a terrible thing to mind) about my plans to try and tweak my IRQ assignments. I've got Cousin Billy's XP Homely Edition and from everything I've read, it decides what to put where as far as IRQ assigments. Then a couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with a technical support guy from Audigy and he told me that my bios default setting that has IRQ 3 "reserved" should be changed to available because my lil'puter doesn't need it reserved. His idea was that it was reserved for older systems that needed it and that mine didn't need it reserved. He said that changing it now wouldn't change anything for the better, but would make it part of the mix when I next reformatted. I enabled it in the bios just after I got off the phone with him and decided that when (I hope I don't die of old age first) the patch comes out, I'd make a clean start of everything again and hope having IRQ 3 available will help spread the load. Does anyone see any problems with this idea?

Solutions for internet security & spyware problems... http://www.geocities.com/callingelvis911/s_s.html

Luckyboy = Senior hydraulic landing gear designer for the P-11 & Contributing Editor to Complete Users magazine.

[Nub_322Sqn]

When I had an IRQ sharing between my graphics card and my sound card I just turned off my pc, took off the power connector and pulled out the sound card and placed it in a different PCI slot. (Raised it one slot)

After that my sound card was assigned to a different IRQ without a reformat.

[Weather_Man]

IRQ 3 is reserved for COM ports 2 and 4 (serial ports). Older sound cards were designed to default to IRQ 5, but now they use any free one.

As far as making IRQ3 unreserved, do not do so unless you have no plans to use the serial port. If you must use IRQ3 for something other than what it's reserved for, then you should also disable the COM2 port in the BIOS so there is no chance of conflict.

Here is a list of the default IRQ assignments:

IRQ
0 System timer
1 keyboard
2 programmable interrupt controller (cascade IRqs 8-15)
3 COM2 and COM4
4 COM1 and COM3
5 LPT2, sound card, network card
6 floppy disk controller
7 LPT1 (printer/parallel port) or sound card (shared)
8 real-time clock
9 cascade IRQ2
10 available
11 available
12 PS/2 mouse (available if not used)
13 numerical processing unit (math coprocessor)
14 Primary IDE controller
15 Secondary IDE controller

It's generally a good idea to leave things as they are. I would only be concerned if it shared IRQs with the video card. In that case, just move the soundcard to a new slot.