computer slow,6 things on irq 11

[seadooman]

working on a toshiba satellite notebook that was given too me.had win98 took 5min to boot formatted and installed win 2k,found to be slow,mouse trails ,slow to respond,check system info/conflicts it lists=video card=modem=card bus=ethernet card=pci audio=pci-usb,all on irq 11,could this be a problem??have tryed to modify settings in device manager but cant because device man. says no conflicts.

help please

 

[franklin97355]

How does it run when you boot to DOS? It might not be capable of running 2K very fast depending on processor and memory. Laptops are slow to start up because the HD is usually a bottleneck in the system.

 

[seadooman]

DOS is fine.650 mhz,64 megs ram,i have a desktop running xp w\ 366 mhz,160 megs ram and its alot faster.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Windows 2000 manages IRQs itself through software - hence you will see Interrupts listed as 16 and above (there are only 16 hardware IRQs!). If it reports no conflicts, then there is no problem. An Interrupt request takes an almost immesurable period of time.

Windows 2000 also needs at least 128Mb RAM to "run", else it "walks". I'd say this is the root cause at a guess...

Your Windows 98 installation may well have been looking for a network resource that does not exist on your network. That's a common cause of slow starting.

I'd recommend rebuilding it and using either Win98SE or Linux on it (both, if the HDD is big enough). Another 64Mb of RAM will also do it a lot of favours - you should then find that W2k is quicker. W2k will use as much RAM as you can throw at it up to 4Gb.

HTH.

 

[satrow]

Seedooman, I have 16 devices listed on IRQ11 on XP, it doesn't appear to cause any problems. As has been mentioned, the hard disk is a major bottleneck, also the graphics may be using shared memory, so they are the areas to target - check crucial.com to see if you can fit an extra 256Mb.

CitrixEngineer, not sure you have it correct re the IRQ 16 and over; I think the APIC that allows the use of extra IRQ's is motherboard (Bios) based, something that has only been added in the last year and a half or so. Not to be used with Win9x systems. See

http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/Speed_Demonz/New_BIOS_Guide/APIC_Function.htm

I haven't seen it on a notebook yet.....

Andy.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

If it's only been added in the last year and a half, how did Windows 2000 cope?

;-)

 

[satrow]

Ok CitrixEngineer, let me try to rephrase it.
APIC - Win2k and XP can make use of the extra hardware IRQ's that have been commonly available in single processor motherboards over the last 18 months or so. Previously, they were only common on multi-processor boards (IRQs to 24 or higher).
ACPI - Win98, ME, 2k and XP all make use of virtual IRQ's (IRQ sharing - as in seedoomans case above where several devices share IRQ9 or 11, etc.).

http://www.buildorbuy.org/irqmap.html

http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/Speed_Demonz/New_BIOS_Guide/APIC_Function.htm

http://www.staudio.de/kb/english/2000xp/

http://www.fceduc.umu.se/~jesruv98/info/acpi/acpi.htm

APM - There are some boards and devices which do not implement the standards well enough to use ACPI; for stability and performance it may then be better to disable ACPI in the Bios and reinstall.
However, laptops are different; they should use ACPI if the APIC option is not available.
Too complex for me too explain simply, I just go out and get them working.

Andy.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

This is a different discussion, although thanks for the links. If you want to know more, Microsoft have loads of guidelines and recommendations on the use of these devices on their website

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/platform/proc/apic.mspx.

I think I was right in assuming that the Toshiba Satellite in question does not have an I/O APIC.

;-)

 

[swayda]

64 megs of RAM are really light for Windows 5. I didn't catch the size of your hard drive. Windows uses virtual memory. It swaps processes to disk when it requires more memory than is physically present. This is called paging. The swap file on your hard drive is named pagefile.sys if I remember correctly. I have 256 megs and my pagefile is around 350 megabytes. When a system pages it slows the system. Excessive paging is called thrashing. Check your HD space. If it is adequate try defragging because while the system is trying to write memory to disk it will write to the first available sector then the next and so on. Disk reads and writes are slow and each non-contiguous block write requires the heads to move to the next available sector. If the computer has ever crashed look for a file named memory.dmp in the Windows installation directory. In one experience I had after a crash the computer took about 4-5 minutes to complete booting after the login. When I looked a memory.dmp it was > 380 megs and was all over the disk in non-contiguous blocks. I erased the file and the computer boted normally. Give it a try,it just may work.

Don Swayser
swayser@optonline.net

 

[satrow]

CitrixEngineer, it's very relevant to having 6 devices on one IRQ!
Yes, you were probably correct in assuming that the Tosh does not have APIC; that's why there are no IRQ's above 15; it has to share. I have seen 733Mhz, single CPU boards with APIC and hardware IRQ's to 23; these boards will accept 600Mhz CPU's so it is not safe to assume; it may have been turned off in the Bios.
You said "Windows 2000 manages IRQs itself through software - hence you will see Interrupts listed as 16 and above (there are only 16 hardware IRQs!" this is not the case; if there are IRQ's listed above 15 it uses APIC ie. hardware.

Seadooman, sorry about hijacking your thread.
If you are still having problems that you think are ACPI (IRQ sharing) related; first try disabling serial and parallel ports in the Bios.
If that doesn't force Windows into changing the problematic interrupts, you could try forcing Windows to use non-ACPI drivers; the method is outlined in the fourth link

http://www.fceduc.umu.se/~jesruv98/info/acpi/acpi.htm

I've had to use this method with two XP machines; it can work well, (the last time I had to do it was to get an old Matrox video processing card to work with a 3Ghz machine and Premiere Pro 7) but if you need to revert, it requires a reinstall.

Andy.

 

[qmann]

Definately a RAM issue.. upgraded RAM in several laptops here and amazing difference when RAM increased in size.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Quote "APIC - Win2k and XP can make use of the extra hardware IRQ's that have been commonly available in single processor motherboards over the last 18 months or so."

...and laptops got I/O APICs much later than desktops. You're assuming that the laptop in question is less than 18 months old. I suppose it might be - but I made the assumption that it was older, due to the Operating Systems that were being run. Toshiba Satellites have been around for years - I still use my 486-based one - and we do not know the age of this one.

FYI, ACPI is SOFTWARE like the BIOS is software (stored in hardware CMOS)

http://www.acpi.info/.

Windows 2000 has an ACPI driver to use it. Also, it doesn't matter if the laptop has 8 local APICs with 24 hardware interrupts each, without an I/O APIC, Windows 2000 reverts to 8259 PIC mode, ie 16 interrupts. Windows XP, on the other hand...

While those tweaking sites are good, I would advise checking out Microsoft and Intel's documentation on this subject.

The reason I think this discussion is O/T, although interesting, is because we ruled out interrupt sharing as being the cause as W2k reported no conflicts - instead it looks like a shortage of RAM. Even done through software in 8259 mode the speed of IRQ sharing is acceptable (if slow - according to Microsoft).