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If you have lost your manuals and are having trouble figuring out which
card may be causing a problem, you can try the brute force approach.
Remove all legacy ISA cards from your system and then re-install them one
at a time until the system quits working. The card that makes the computer
stop working correctly will be the one that needs to be dealt with.
Once the offending card has been identified you have a few different
options. One option is to simply remove the card from your system.
However, you’ve likely got the card in there for a reason, so unless it’s an
old sound card you don’t care about keeping, you’ll probably want to use an
approach to remedying the problem that allows the card to remain in the
system.
Another option is to change the IRQ on the legacy card to an IRQ that isn’t
currently being used as reported by the Reporter program. While this may
fix the problem at hand, the next time you add another new Plug-and-Play
card you may wind up with another conflict. If you choose this option it is
still a good idea to reserve the IRQ as described below.
Reserving an IRQ within the BIOS
Other than removing the offending legacy card, the next most effective
method is to reserve the IRQ for legacy use within your BIOS. To do this
you will need to enter the BIOS configuration screen when your computer
first starts up. This is usually done by pressing the
Delete
key or
F1
key
right after the memory test during the boot-up routine. Once you’re in the
BIOS control panel, check to see if you are given the option of manually
configuring your interrupts. Some BIOS’s, such as those from Award, allow
you to choose between “Plug-and-Play” and “legacy ISA” for each interrupt.
If you select “legacy ISA” for the interrupt that is being used by your legacy
card, the BIOS will know not to assign that interrupt to a Plug-and-Play
card.
Unfortunately, many BIOS’s don’t support this capability. If your BIOS is
one of those, don’t worry: You still have another option.
