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Mobo dying .... suggestions please on upgrading my system ...

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dk70:
May be Netgear have new firmware? Each product have a page at their site. Also take a look at DSLreport, especially their forum about Netgear http://www.dslreports.com/forum/netgear

http://kbserver.netgear.com/products/wn311b.asp 28.09 you got 1.2? No changelog but check forums/Google

Now you know how Nvidia Firewall have worked for many. Its low level drivers are gone? System properties, show hidden devices, non-plug&play devices - "NVTCP" NVIDIA TCP/IP Protocol Driver ?

Nothing to do about ram than hope next modules work. If same error experiment with voltage, not timings. They should be able to run at rated timings. Also try 1T vs. 2T. Who knows if they demand 1T. Ive had expensive ram on NF4 which was close to unstable, 1T meant BSOD instantly. Now I got cheaper Corsair 4000PT and never a problem. You run into these problems no matter chipset, never plug and plug.

So ram is probably defect but these type of problems are typical of new computer. In 1 week situation will be better.

Carol Haynes:
Frustrated and confused ...

I seem to have finally got WiFi working again ...

I have been running nTune's System Stability Test for two hours, on top of that I have had Windows Media Player playing music, HaupPauge TV card showing Digital TV and Firefox downloading 3 CD sized files as well as processing 40 open DC windows at a time.

Is it finally stable? Who knows, probably turn it on again tomorrow and find WiFi is screwed again!

Any ideas on how to distribute IRQs in Windows XP more sensibly? (I seem to remember the answer is no for this)

Currently I have IRQ 18 assigned to:

4 Hauppauge TV PCI related devices
1 GeForce Graphics card PCIe
1 Firewire/1394 device controller

The upshot is that analogue TV has interference lines across the screen.

I don't want to swap the cards around again because I have finally got my Audigy and NetGear's card on unshared IRQs.

I thought PCIe were handled separately from PCI cards? How do they end up sharing IRQs for the PCI bus ??

By the way do you know if I should have Plug'n'Play OS enabled or disabled in the BIOS for Windows XP? It is disabled by default and I know that was correct for earlier versions of Windows?

dk70:
Well you can force manual control of irqs but you dont want to. Motherboard is not designed for that. Sharing is not a bad thing, cant be avoided and some "conflicts" are meant to be. However you chose which pci slot to use, what you can do. Judging from 2.5.3 in manual I would use slot 3 for the most picky/important pci card. The other two share with video card(s). Actually my tv-card share with video card and no problems. Trial and error with this. Ive seen same lines on NF2 motherboard, tv-card didnt work well under some conditions because SATA was tied to pci-traffic - not really documented anywhere.

Plug&Play setting dont matter, XP overrules. At least as long as you have APIC enabled. Dont disable or XP wont boot. If you really want to try non-APIC then "Computer" driver must be replaced in XP first - then reboot and disable APIC in bios. I bet setup will be worse than what you have to deal with now, not even worth an experiment. Motherboards have been designed to take advantage of APIC since forever.

In theory you cant have a problem with all these virtual wonder irqs http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/IO-APIC.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/apic.mspx

Ive read you can reset XP hardware configuration and let it redetect on next reboot. Should be necessary sometimes, I guess if XP dont react to your moving cards about or to onboard feature being disabled. Dont expect a logic saying X disabled means XP put Y at "free" irq. As said many irqs are fixed and cant be overtaken.

Carol Haynes:
Yes that's what I thought (experience in the past and MS KB) but it is getting a little ridiculous that it doesn't matter which slot I put the WiFi card in it causes problems.

I'm really fed up with Netgear - their support is completely useless - I have been submitting requests for over a month and haven't yet had a single piece of advice from them. They do respond - but just to say it is to hard for them and someone else will contact me, when they do they ask for system specs etc. and after sending them in I never hear any more. Complete waste of time as far as I can see.

Given that I can't get it to work - even with Netgear "support" I am tempted to RMA the card and try the USB version - at least that won't be tied to PCI IRQs in the same way.

Currently I have the Netgear card showing up in my Devices list without a driver (!) and I am using a cable to the router to get online. Even so it says that the WiFi card is allocated to IRQ 5 (which would be unshared), but when I install the device driver Windows changes the IRQ assignment and it ends up shared with a graphics card and a 1394 interface.

At one point in all this fiddling I ended up with graphics card, sound card, network card and PCI bus management all on one IRQ - no wonder the mouse moved sporadically around the screen - that IRQ must have been almost permanently high!

Looking at the manual (p. 2.18) I guess if I disable the RAID, onboard LAN and 1394 then only PCI slot 3 should be shared - but I am guessing that Windows IRQ allocation will screw up any logic there - plus when I disabled onboard LAN Windows refused to boot at all - I would have to reinstall it all with the BIOS set that way - and then presumably it would screw up if in the future I needed to reenable the onboard LAN.

I'm almost at the point where I am going to settle for a wired LAN connection and forget WiFi, but given that I bought 270Mbs WiFi card I don't see why I should settle for a 100Mbs wired connection!

Anyone else reading this think of any possible solutions?

Carol Haynes:
Fair enough I sent a scorching email to NetGear UK Customer Services complaining about their lack of response from technical support (this was after spending 37 minutes on hold waiting to speak to someone). Surprisingly I got a phone call yesterday (even though I hadn't given them my telephone number and I am ex-directory!) and they have offered to swap my PCI card for the new 270Mbps USB adapter. In some ways this suits me even better as it leaves me with an extra PCI slot if I need it in the future. Hopefully it will work  :huh:

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