Sound Card Freezing Windows XP

[henribastien]

Ok, I just bought a soundblaster Live! Value (yea I know its not the
best but it is all I need for now).

My problem is whenever I run a game it ends up freezing windows
completly and I must do a hard reboot.

I figured out maybe it could be the IRQ conflic, so I tried to change
the IRQ my soundcard is using. Problem is, I don't seem to be able to
do so.

Here is my IRQ list

[IRQs]

Resource Device Status
IRQ 0 System timer OK
IRQ 1 Easy Internet Keyboard OK
IRQ 3 Communications Port (COM2) OK
IRQ 4 Communications Port (COM1) OK
IRQ 6 Standard floppy disk controller OK
IRQ 8 System CMOS/real time clock OK
IRQ 9 Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System OK
IRQ 13 Numeric data processor OK
IRQ 14 Primary IDE Channel OK
IRQ 15 Secondary IDE Channel OK
IRQ 16 NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460 OK
IRQ 16 VIA Rev 5 or later USB Universal Host Controller OK
IRQ 17 Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller OK
IRQ 17 VIA USB Enhanced Host Controller OK
IRQ 17 Creative SB Live! Value (WDM) OK
IRQ 18 D-Link DFE-538TX 10/100 Adapter #2 OK
IRQ 19 VIA Rev 5 or later USB Universal Host Controller OK
IRQ 21 VIA Rev 5 or later USB Universal Host Controller OK
IRQ 21 VIA Rev 5 or later USB Universal Host Controller OK


As you can see my Sound card is on IRQ 17 (wich is something like a
virtual IRQ) now I tried in the bios to go under PCI COnfiguration and
set the corresponding PCI slot to IRQ 5 but it didn't changed anything
and I still use IRQ 17. I can't seem to find a way to change IRQ # in
windows since the set this manualy seems grayed out.

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong place and its just that my soundcard is
broken. Maybe I should do a clean reinstall of windows XP.

I'm just asking some input from you guys if you can give me some help.

If you need it for some reasons here are my specs:
SB Live! Value on PCI Slot 3
D-Link Ethernet Card on PCI Slot 2
AGP MSI GF4 MX 460 (No comments )
Athlon XP 1900+
512Mb RAM
Windows XP Pro SP2

 

[Rich Barry]

Have you tried a different PCI slot? Also, disable your Comm Ports in
the Bios which will free up IRQ 3 & 4. if you are
not using them.

 

[henribastien]

Well, after having tried 2 slots, the third one worked. Thx for the
info on freeing IRQ 3 & 4. though there wasn't anything conflicting
with it. I think my pci slots are assigned to a specific IRQ and other
things can also get assigned to the same IRQ. I don'T know how to fix
that though and the only way I seems to be able to fix this is by
moving the card to an other pci slot.

 

[Rich Barry]

You are correct. Some of the PCI slots share IRQs with certain
devices. For instance on my Motherboard
Epox 8K3A+ it's best to use slots 2 and 5 since they don't share an
IRQ with any other device. Depending on your
Bios some will allow you to assign a specific IRQ to a device or pci
slot.