Windows 7: How do you change IRQ Sharing Conflicts?

I have IRQ 21 shared by both Nvidia Nforce Serial ATA Controller and Nvidia Nforce Networking Controller. Creative has told me this could be the reason my sound is popping. Can I change the IRQs each device is using? Windows 7 should not have done this, but it did...how do I get each on its own IRQ...or just change one?

Actually it's generally up to the BIOS to assign hardware resources... If you notice during boot up (if you don;t have silent boot in the BIOS on) The BIOS will print out the interrupt usage for all devices before windows even starts.

However, for some devices you can change the interrupt from the device manager on the resources tab of the properties for the device. (I.e. you can do this for serial ports). But for most devices, the "Change Settings" option is greyed out and you will have to figure out how to move them in the BIOS if it allows it...

I've had a lot of trouble with nforce chipsets and audio basically swore of them, the FireWire interface also suffers horribly from massive lag blocks that blow the timing to firewire devices requiring resets on the bus right in the middle of audio work

If you can, move your sound card to a different slot on your motherboard. No, I don't think you can manually re-assign IRQ's. You might be able to in the BIOS but not in Windows. At least thats been my experience. YMMV

Thanks guys, I will try moving the sound card soon. I need to remove the drivers first if I remember right? I cannot change the IRQ from the BIOS or in Windows, wish I could but no dice.

If you are permanently removing it you uninstall the drivers. If you are just moving to a different motherboard slot you don't need to bother. You may get a new hardware detected and the drivers installed automatically after the move. If you want you can go to device manager and right click your sound card entry and select uninstall. Then power down and move it. You can uninstall the drivers if you want, I personally wouldn't if I was just moving it to a different slot.

Sounds easy, thanks for the help. I will give it a try this weekend.

It's a long time since I had to alter anything in the BIOS but usually you have to alter the auto setting for IRQ selection to manual and then they appear. If you have to go this route then make sure you know all the other IRQ settings. It might be that these days you can't manually assign them though.

I thought about trying that and even looked at it in the BIOS. The thing is Windows pretty much changes the IRQs to what it wants after boot except for the ones that are locked to IDE, floppy...etc. I would rather not do it that way due to the duel boot I have in affect right now.

I moved the sound card with no issues, but the sound is still popping. IRQ 21 is still shared by both Nvidia Nforce Serial ATA Controller and Nvidia Nforce Networking Controller. I have one other PCI slot I can try, not so sure it will work. Many people have had this issue and not been able to resolve it.

I had popping and drop outs with my onboard VIA sound on this PC when I first set it all up. In my case it turned out to be the ASUS supplied sound driver. Once I installed a driver I downloaded directly from VIA it worked fine. I'm not saying thats your problem, its just food for thought.