Author: Bob Durrett
Date: 05:46:01 03/18/03
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On March 18, 2003 at 04:19:43, Alastair Scott wrote: >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 Thanks Bob D.
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