The best, and the easiest way to accomplish this is to uninstall the sound card drivers, remove the sound card, place it in a different PCI slot that shares no interrupt with the AGP slot, and reinstall the card. (Refer to the mainboard manual for this information.)
That's assuming there is really a problem with the system just because the two devices are sharing an IRQ, which is becoming much more of a rarity than a common occurance with ACPI loaded ... if all the drivers on the system are the latest versions, specifically, the chipset drivers, the sound card drivers, and video card drivers ... and if the BIOS is flashed to the newest release.
IRQ sharing works considerably better in WinXP than it did in the past.
There are still some programs on the market that recommend that the video card and the sound card be assigned different IRQ's, but much of that information is out-of-date, and based on how IRQ's were assigned with Win9x and the older APM power management.
There <i>is</i> a quick and dirty method to change the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) to Standard PC in the Device Manager after disabling APCI in the BIOS, but it's not the recommended, or (IMHO), the best solution, as this often makes the system unstable.
The best method to change the HAL is detailed in this site link:
<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=47" target="_new">Why are all my devices using one IRQ in Win2K or WinXP?</A>
Personally, I wouldn't change the HAL unless the hardware is too old to be ACPI-compliant. Many users who have recently switched to WinXP are startled to discover than the bulk of their devices are sharing one or two IRQ's, and think that this is a problem, per say ... which is why they seek information on how to gain manual control over the IRQ assignments ... although I don't know if that is applicable in your situation.
If your hardware really is too old to be ACPI-compliant, then I'd either take steps to replace the mainboard, or stick with an older operating system.
Note: Five things. If you wish to control the IRQ addresses from the BIOS, you'll also need to change the Plug-n-Play setting in the BIOS to "No" before re-installing the OS, otherwise, Windows will again take over the IRQ assignments. And afterwards, you'll need to access the Power Management tab in the Control Panel make sure APM is enabled, or your system won't shut down properly. Three, if you have optical devices that need access to the sound card, without the ACPI HAL, you'll need to manually connect the devices to the sound card to the internal connectors with cables. Fourth ... you should be aware that many PCI sound cards, such as those from Creative tend to cause high PCI latency across the bus, and this can interfere with the functionality of some high-end audio programs (such as Cakewalk) and this can usually be corrected to a certain degree by applying a patch from the chipset manufacturer (a feat more easily done with VIA mainboards than Intel mainboards).
In the last scenario, the problem is not so much an ACPI issue as it is a problem with the sound card itself.
Fifth ... there have been some BIOS issues with ACPI-compatibility that have been showing up when installing 32-bit operating systems (which can include Linux). The only workarounds for this are to either flash the BIOS to a workable version, or RMA the board back to the manufacturer so that it can be replaced with a newer revision, such as with some of the Iwill boards I attempted to install earlier this year. This can also involve the APIC controller in the BIOS, (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller), which is a fairly new feature being implemented on modern mainboards ... and in certain systems, this can cause problems with IRQ sharing in Windows. This is why I generally recommend that the setting be changed back to the older, legacy PIC controller before installing WinXP, or bad pool calls from the BIOS can make IRQ sharing nearly impossible, and force Windows to disable the video card, regardless of the HAL selection or the driver versions installed for the PCI and AGP devices.
Toey
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