Author: Alastair Scott
Date: 01:19:43 03/18/03
Go up one level in this thread
On March 17, 2003 at 21:50:41, Bob Durrett wrote:
>I am thinking about purchasing a new computer and have a bunch of peripherals I
>would like to use with the new computer in addition to my chess software.
>
>My current computer has two USB2 ports and I have several peripheral devices.
>In other words, the computer I have is not good enough. Currently, my color
>printer and my Chessbase software interfere with each other. Chessbase ran fine
>until I installed the color printer driver and started using the printer.
>
>My impression is that CB8 uses an IRQ. Does anybody know if that's right? My
>current computer, using Windows XP Home, shows only twelve IRQs in the device
>manager. Is that standard for Windows XP Home, or is that hardware driven?
There are only ever 16 IRQs (a part of the IA32 architecture set in stone) and
three of those (0-2) are always used by the motherboard, that also being set in
stone. So all other peripherals have to share the thirteen of them that are
left.
Software can't occupy IRQs; they're used by hardware.
The ISA bus absolutely cannot share IRQs. The PCI bus can, so IRQ conflicts are
not generally a problem as the bus and the operating system together usually
tackle them, but sometimes they can be.
As the following list shows my Linux machine has one shared IRQ (12) and several
unassigned, yet the ceiling isn't falling in :)
CPU0
0: 275639 XT-PIC timer
1: 4509 XT-PIC keyboard
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
3: 2 XT-PIC ohci1394
8: 1 XT-PIC rtc
10: 0 XT-PIC usb-ohci
11: 0 XT-PIC ehci-hcd
12: 120838 XT-PIC usb-ohci, NVIDIA nForce Audio
14: 19744 XT-PIC ide0
15: 34 XT-PIC ide1
DMA channels are similarly shared around.
As for the printer killing ChessBase (or vice versa), I can't help thinking that
sloppily written drivers are the real problem, not a hardware conflict, and
ChessBase products are not exactly a paragon of software engineering themselves
;)
So try to find, download and install the latest version of the driver or,
failing that, install the Microsoft driver (from the operating system CD) if
there is one. (It will generally be smaller than the manufacturer's driver and
free of rubbish; some hardware, such as Soundblaster cards, is infamous for
plastering all sorts of unnecessary software everywhere on installation).
If that doesn't work this problem - whatever it is - is almost impossible to
solve without physically being in front of the computer. However, I recommend
one of two excellent packages:
Aida 32 http://www.aida32.hu/
Sandra 2003 http://www.sisoftware.net/
which can diagnose and suggest fixes if there does happen to be some sort of
hardware conflict.
Generally - no matter what works or doesn't - I also recommend that you turn off
all the devices you don't need; in the above listing there are no parallel or
serial ports because I switched them off in the BIOS; ditto the on-board video
as I have a separate AGP card.
Alastair
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