IRQ troubles and crackling sound.

[Radiation]

I have a sound card I need to keep on a real IRQ but windows keeps putting it above 15 into the fake range, I have disabled about 4 or more devices in the BIOS that use up IRQ's and windows won't do anything with them even though they are free.

This is a fresh install of XP so nothing should be interfering, i keep changing the card to different PCI slots and when i start windows it will often at first say its using a sub 15 IRQ but when i come to install the drivers it changes to above 15.

The sound card works ok but not with a low latency buffer and even 512 has pops and crackles, i really need it set lower which was the whole point of buying the card in the first place.

I tried installing windows as Standard PC instead of ACPI so i could set IRQ's manually but i had problems because it couldn't read the SATA drivers from the floppy a second time after the formatting had finished, everything was physically fine so windows or the drivers of Standard PC were not working well, so im back to ACPI.

I would really appreciate some help if you can thanks!

 

[Radiation]

Thanks for the advice, most of it i have done already but some i will now try as i hadn't thought much else could be a problem, i mainly thought the irq was the enemy.

Good guess with m-audio, its the audiophile 2496 which i did have working ok ages ago so i know it can be fine even with acpi, the motherboard is an asus a8v deluxe, everything is updated including bios, the only piece of hardware that i thought might cause problems from what i've read is the sata drives or possibly the tv card maybe?

 

[Radiation]

Yeah - the 2496 should be fine with ACPI, my Delta44 is a very similar architecture and works well.

I would guess at some incompatibility with the TV card - try pulling it out and uninstalling the drivers.

Maybe try just disabling it in device manager first as that saves opening the case.

I've found that certain a/v codecs can mess with hardware settings a bit too.
Since it's a fresh install this shouldn't be a problem though...

Yeah i plan to get it sorted one way or another, still very annoying you can't force an irq though, its always good to have options.