A7v133 woes.

[Guest]

Well I would like my First post to be more joyous than this. but unfortunately it doesn't work out that way. Right now I'm running Windows 2000 with a 1.2Ghz AMD T-bird. on an Asus A7V133 with the latest Via drivers installed. well when I goto look at my IRQ's there are 8 items sharing IRQ 9.
I know this isn't normal so lemme show you what's sittin on IRQ 9.

Win2000 Promise Ultra 1000 IDE controller.
Via USB Universal host controller
Via USB Universal host controller
Creative SB Live!
Nvidia Geforce2 GTS
Intel pro/100+ management Adapter
Initio Ultra SCSI Host Adapter
Microsoft ACPI-compliant system

The one thing that urks me is that's all of my PCI cards. and my AGP card sitting on IRQ 9. I'm basically asking for anyway to combat this. Because this is making life trying to run on my ATA100 a bit miserable. Any suggestions comments would be appreciated. lemme know if you need any more information.

John



err... is it supposed to smoke like that?

 

[dmcmahon]

This is, unfortunately, normal for W2K. It maps all PCI devices (that includes the AGP and built-ins like the USB chain) to a single IRQ. It's a Microsoft "feature". The only way around it is to disable ACPI during the installation process. It shouldn't be necessary, though; PCI supports IRQ sharing and W2K is supposed to be pretty good with shared IRQs. The underlying physical INT lines are still separate (and wired to the slots and built-in devices as described in your manual). The problem is not specific to the A7V133, by the way. And, if you installed another OS, such as Windows ME, you would find that the devices indeed get separate IRQs (typically matching the hardware INTs). I have a virtually identical machine (I have a GF2 MX vid card), and I have it dual-boot in W2K and ME. I boot up under ME for games, to make sure the vid and sound cards have separate IRQs.

 

[jlanka]

My W2K T-Bird ABIT KT7-RAID running ACPI is rock solid. Don't worry about it unless you've got serious stability problems that you can't solve any other way.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

 

[njeske]

I have Win2k and an Abit KT7A-Raid motherboard. All my devices share a common IRQ except my Sound Blaster Live! uses IRQ 7. I don't know why the sound card decided to use it's own IRQ, but whatever the heck works, right?

Anyways... I have had no problems with having all the devices share an IRQ. I think (notice I said think) that if you really wanted to you could go in and tell your bios to assign an IRQ to each PCI slot and tell it that PNP OS is NOT insalled. That MIGHT force Win2k to use the bios settings, but who knows how it will react. If you try that idea out, let me know how it works.

 

[Guest]

I wanna thank you guys for your replies. you have all been helpful. I hate to ask too many questions initially but, I have one more. After combating my Computer for the past few days. I decided to win the war, and format. Well I got it all formatted however I can't seem to install an OS anymore. I'll get random errors with win98 during the copying of files. and Win2k will blue screen on me during the setup. Well I narrowed it down to the fact that when I finally successfully installed win98 if my BIOS sets my RAM to 133Mhz I'll get Registry errors, and Msgsrvr errors. and win2k won't even install. Well initially you guys are thinking does this guy even have PC133 RAM installed? Unfortunately I do. 3 256MB sticks of Cas2 Micron. yet I can only run it in 100Mhz mode stabily. My question is, is there any way to fix this? I know the RAM is good, but do the BIOS have a hard time handling this? also is there any little tweaks I should do to Jury rig it so it is stable at 133Mhz. For refrencing. My BIOS revision is 1004. and the RAM is Micron. Any suggestions/questions lemme know. Thanks in advance.


John

err... is it supposed to smoke like that?

 

[jlanka]

Try it with 2 sticks to see if it makes any difference (or maybe even 1 stick). I've heard sometimes 3 causes a problem.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

 

[pek]

I had the same problem with Micron cl2 pc133 ram (256k)on my a7v133. I always got errors when I tested with Norton and kept getting corrupted registries. I got some crucial ram on order and will swap out first thing.

pek