Modem Irq in XP

[Zmoney]

ok i just got XP up and runnin last night..the thing is that whenever i install ANY version of windows it makes my modem and my video card have the same irq port..this makes my system freeze around every 20-30 min..and well that just suckz....i normall just go into the device manager and change it thru there but it wont let me touch change anything....under resources in the profile for my modem...the box "use atomatic settings" is checked and greyed out..i wanna uncheck it so i can mess with my irq...it will not let me...can anyone help??

[onetrueday]

sure. Go into your device manager under 'computer' is the acpi driver. go to properties on that and update the driver to 'standard pc'. That should solve your problem.

[Zmoney]

Thankx so much...i have called every comp shop in all of portland and nothig...thanks again

[YeOldeStonecat]

Couple of things.....solve this via hardware first.

When installing Windoze....it's best to yank out all your peripheral cards, like sound/NIC/modem, etc etc. Just leave the absolute bare essentials that you need to run Windows setup, which is video, and SCSI/RAID card for your hard drive if you're running SCSI/RAID.

Get everything updated, hopefully you have done your homework ahead of time and downloaded the latest drivers for everything, and have them either already on another partition of your drive, or on a zip drive, or burnt cd.

Now install each leftover component separately, completely installing it and rebooting several times before moving onto the next component.

General rule of thumb....leave the top PCI slot of your motherboards empty....do not use it....it often will share the IRQ of your AGP video card, which you do not want. PCI slot #2 is most commonly suggested for your NIC...mileage may vary according to your mobo.

Many motherboards, in their BIOS, let you manually specify the IRQ a specific slot will use....I have my PCI RAID card in slot #5, locked to IRQ 3, because if I left it up to PnP, it tended to keep wanting IRQ 10 which my video card wants. So I disabled COM 2 in BIOS, cuz I don't use serial ports, which freed up IRQ 3, and manually specified PCI 5 to use that IRQ.

Also disable things you don't use in BIOS, like COM1, COM2, which frees up IRQ 4 and IRQ 3. Hardly anyone uses those old 9 pin serial ports anymore. Also LPT1 uses IRQ 7....kill that if you don't use it. So if you have a networked printer, or USB printer, kill that old printer port.

[Zmoney]

did that...no go..man this is making me so mad...thx for the help tho...man thsi is wierd

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yeah it is weird...you should be able to hard lock resources for whatever hardware you want in BIOS and Windoze will see it that way...it won't have a choice.