Win XP won't let me change IRQ which is causing problems

This has been A&A on this group already but the most likely what you are seeing
is the motherboard has set the system resources for the PCI bus and therefore XP
is locked out. If you want to "unshare" the IRQ between the NIC and Sound, you
need to move one or the other. Most likely you would want to move the Sound
card. NIC cards normally share IRQ's without problems. However, sound cards,
especially SoundBlaster cards don't seem to like to share IRQ's.

I would suggest you examine the motherboards documentation and see what PCI slot
is not sharing IRQ's with any other device. There is usually one slot which is
isolated. If your main boards documentation does not offer this information,
you might have to experiment with changing to several slots until you find that
the card is all by itself.

Good Luck,
Paul

"casey" <three50125@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:0b0901c3456b$ff519620$a001280a@phx.gbl...

> Hi,
>
> Could someone tell me how I work around Windows XP
> refusing to allow me to manually assign an IRQ to a
> device? My Ethernet card and sound card are sharing the
> same IRQ, which is causing a game to crash (I've confirmed
> that this is definitely the cause).
>
> All of the options are grayed out, and when I right click
> for info, it basically says "If this is grayed out, you
> cannot change it" ... wtf???
>
> Thanks in advance for anyone that can help