With the A7V and A7V133 I HIGHLY recommend not messing with the XP settings for interrupt sharing. You should have ZERO conflicts using ACPI interrupt sharing! We played with it and disabled ACPI and miniport drivers and it didn't run NEARLY as smooth.
About a month ago, I had to give up my MSI K7-Master-S when a customer, "Had to have it today". As stock was at zero, I sold my mobo for 30% off and ran to the back room to find something old to use. Luckily, I found two boards an A7V rev. b and an A7V133 Rev. C. I opted for the A7V133 for the obvious reasons and started moving my stuff into it.
To give you an idea on just how bad things can be, let me tell you about my system.
I have a SB Live! Value, A VisionTek TNT2M64 with 32MB, 4-40GB, 7200RPM ATA-100 drives (Make sure you download the latest promise drivers from the Asus Germany website AFTER installing XP!!!!!!) An ATA-33 CD-ROM drive, an ATA-33 DMA CD-Burner, A Zip 250 drive, and a seagate Travan Drive all installed with no problems. To complicate matters, I have an Adaptec Ultra 160 SCSI controller hooked up to 4 IBM 18GB, 15K-RPM drives. I also have two DFE-550TX+ Network cards, a Modem Blaster PCI, two USB cameras and I got the one that absolutely positively won't work with XP (Ezonics USB 1 camera) running with no problems, a Umax Scanner and LexMark Z43.
This machine is also setup to be an Internet Host running IIS, VPN tunnelling and a web hosting setup to let anyone access the system or the system's web site via my IP address or dnsalias.com addresses. Of course, I also have Remote Desktop enabled, so this same address will let you login to XP as if you were sitting at my desk.
In other words, I am using every slot, I have two drives that won't fit in my Q500 case (well, they sit on the bottom of the case without being screwed in anyway) and I've got more toys plugged in than Tracy Lords has stashed under her bed. I've got more interrupt shares than Bill Gates has friends and I can't emphasize enough how well it is working.
Since installing XP on this system, I have had ZERO... let me emphasize this... ZERO crashes!
Right now I have (oh my god) 22 Internet Explorer windows open, the machines personal web server is up (and 4 people are logged in), Outlook 2002 open, I'm burning a CD and I have Messenger, AIM, Norton Anti-Virus Corporate Edition 7.6, real player and a bunch of other programs running too. Any time now the fax line will ring and XP Fax will answer that too, all without any problems.
Needless to say, under Windows 98 or Windows 2000 this would be like a fantasy. So far, no matter how crazy I get with throwing devices or applications at this poor little 1GHz system, I can't do anything to crash it.
About a week ago a customer came in and tried to buy it from me. I told him that now that this A7V133 runs like a dream, I'll never give it up. (Okay, until I build myself a new toy).
Wow, I feel like I have found new love for an old board. Oh, I should also mention that I'm only using a 200MHz bus CPU and Corsair CAS2 PC133 RAM. So to everyone that says you need a multi-CPU system to make XP run fast and smooth, I can only say... Ha!
My boot time is 12 seconds to the login screen.
My post login boot time is 14 seconds (including the time to fully load the IIS, the Symantec Anti-Virus 7.6 C/E software) and all my chat, sound, video and winzip TSR's.
All desktop applications start and fully load within 2 seconds of clicking the Icon except Diablo II LOD, which takes about 4 seconds (which may be because of my no-cd hack, but I'm not sure). As a side note, I can be playing Diablo II while all of this other stuff is running too. Again, no problems.
Stephen Benoit
Stable Technologies
'The way IT should be!'
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram