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HELP >.... Some sort of IRQ conflict (I think) ... anyone andy ideas?

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Carol Haynes:
I bit the bullet following recent hard disc problesm and bought a new pair of WD Caviar 260 Gb EIDE drive. (I have set the old drives up as two single disk RAID arrays - that way i can still grab data from them if I need to).

I have spent the last 24 hours copying partitions from the old drives to the new (and kept the old drives as above in case of any data corruption in the process).

Whilst I had the box in bits I also added  a second 512Mb of memory. That tests OK, so shouldn't be a problem.

Trouble is I am runninging inot a glitch now ...

I am getting periodic pauses where mouse/keyboard don't respond for a few seconds and then play catch up when they become respsonsive again. It's really annoying and I suspect it is an IRQ setting problem.

Being Windows XP it doesn't seem possible to tweak the settings manually.

Anyone any idea how to fix this before I go barking mad ... ? (IRQ list below)

I know there are disabled devices (they are 1394/Firewire netwrok interfaces that I don't use).

No device on the system reports an IRQ conflict, but as you can see there are a number of IRQs which share 3 devices - and they are all hungry devices (RAID / Enhanced USB, aka USB2 / Wireless Network Card / Graphics card etc).

The other really annoying thing is that a number of bits of software are demanding to be reactivated - just beacuse I changed my hard disc:

RoboForm Pro
NitroPDF
iTunes

iTunes and Nitro both reactivated fine, but RoboForm have changed their activation system and it won't let me reactivate (says I have activated too many times). There is no option to deactivate RoboForm - so what do they expect you to do? Really pi****ed off with this sort of behaviour. Why is it that companies now seem to think that it is OK to bugger about with genuine users who have purchased their products, knowing full well that anyone who wants to a cracked version can do so without all this hassle!!

WindowsXP and MS Office both behaved perfectly - for once MS gets this right.

Anyway ... IRQ list:

Innuendo:
Oh, geesh...you have a VIA chipset I notice.

You may want to reinstall the latest VIA chipset drivers and see if that doesn't fix it. If not, we'll try something else.

EDIT: I just noticed double trouble...you may wish to ensure you have the latest Promise drivers as well.

Carol Haynes:
Yes, I'll try the latest VIA drivers.

As for Promise Drivers ... it's difficult 'cos I have combined trouble here - the mobo is an MSI K7T266Pro2-RU which is otherwise excellent (if getting a bit long in the tooth now). Trouble is the RAID support os for Promise Lite - which is fine for what I want., however you can't use standard Promise drivers - you have to use MSI versions and they haven't been updated since 2001 !!!

I can update the mobo BIOS to release the 'full RAID' version (it is basically hobbled in software) but when I tried this a long time ago I got some disk write errors which were a bit of a mystery. There don't seem to be errors in the 'Lite' version so it could be a BIOS issue.

I also have an ATI Radeon AIW graphics card - and am using the latest 'recommended' version of their Catalyst drivers. The later versions will apparently work with my card but aren't recommended. I don't play games much (and none that require top notch graphics) so I can't see the point of upgrading the graphics card for the sake of it, but it doesn mean drivers are a bit static.


By the way interesting response to my Roboform reactivation issue. I complained that this sort of draconian protection really only affects customers ... here is what they said:

William replied (2005/11/19 12:30 am EST)   

if you do not want to reactivate often then do not reformat your disk.

our proctection scheme will not change -- eveb if you do not like it.
--- End quote ---

Hmmm ... so much for customer service.

mouser:
my god that is an insane response.  are they trying to lose customers?

Carol Haynes:
I suppose they would argue that they gave me quick easy access to reactivate again (even though their system said I had reactivated too many times). This is true.

I just feel that this reactivation lark is getting beyond a joke.

If it carries on this way it is going to take hours over days for people to get their systems up and running properly after a hardware change as they wade through dozens of apps that need to to be reactivated.

Even worse is that lots of apps now are trying to enforce one (or limited numbers) install only - this is true of things like Audible Manager, iTunes and biggies like Adobe Photoshop CS (I have not upgraded from version 7 for this reason) - in fact all Adobe products now  to name just a few.

Some (most) software doesn't have a deactivate function so that you can move it from one machine to another and for those that do - how does this help if you have a hardware fault that stops deactivation.

Strikes me that ultimately this is madness for everyone - legitimate users and software companies. Ultimately users are annoyed and alienated, and companies need to employ sufficient staff to man reactivation desks 24/7/365 to try and mitigate that irritation. Meanwhile anyone that wants to get a hacked version can find any numbers of copies with a couple of mouse clicks.

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