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Diagnosing
and fixing an IRQ conflicts
with your PCI
Network adapter
You just installed
your new network card. All the drivers are installed, all the correct
LED’s glow, the stars are in alignment,
and the
thing STILL
will not work. Symptoms include corrupted files when transfering, not being
able to browse your network, and sometimes dropped packets when you
run a PING. What you may be experiencing is an IRQ conflict.
Your computer ‘should’ be able to share IRQ’s between cards but often, network
cards like their own IRQ.
Since IRQ sharing is not considered a
‘conflict’, your computer will not raise any red flags (or yellow
exclamation marks!). No errors will occur, but your network card will
still not work.
 In comes a handy system utility inside windows called
MSINFO, or rather, MSINFO32. From the START menu, select run and type in
MSINFO32.exe and click OK
Open the “Hardware Resources”
tree and then select the “Conflicts/Sharing” folder. If your NIC appears
here, your NIC is sharing an IRQ! NOTE: if it is
only sharing an IRQ with "PCI IRQ Steering" it's OK. IRQ steering is not
a real device.
The best way to change the IRQ your NIC has is to
place the NIC in another slot. If you do not have another slot, you may
have to swap your cards around to find a combination that works. Many
cards these days do not mind sharing IRQ’s, but NIC’s are often not one of
them.
According to Microsoft ( article
here), placing your NIC in PCI slot 1 is bad news. You will
probably end up with a NIC sharing an IRQ with your video card.
Symptoms: "Unable to browse network" messages when looking at your network
neighborhood. Read the article
for the fixes Good Luck! (you might need it)
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Fix IRQ Sharing
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