[snowman]

von der kt7-faq:

Why do I have 6 devices sharing the same IRQ?
This is not actually a fault of the BIOS or the motherboard.

This is a feature of the new ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) that can be found in Windows 2000 and also Windows 98SE. Windows 2000 will automatically enable ACPI when it is installed if it detects a compatible motherboard and BIOS during installation - which the ABIT KT7 is. You probably didn't experience this with your previous motherboard because it (or the BIOS) wasn't ACPI compliant!

It is extremely common (if not normal?) for the ACPI to cause several PCI devices to all share the same IRQ. Providing your hardware properly supports ACPI this is not a problem and you need not worry about it - the days of worrying about shared IRQ's are drawing to a close! You will notice that ACPI overides the IRQ allocations that the BIOS made on booting.

A fairly interesting web page describing one ordinary user's experiences with ACPI under Windows 2000 is available here - he too has 4 devices sharing an IRQ! A full detailed technical description of the ACPI standard, also known as OnNow is available at Microsoft's developer site.

Note that Microsoft's Knowledge base has an article entitled "IRQ Sharing in Windows 2000" (Q252420). In summary this article states that PCI devices are designed to share IRQs, and that this is especially common in Windows 2000 when ACPI is enabled. It states that under the Resources tab of Device Manager you may see several devices sharing IRQs and that it is not possible (or necessary) to change this in Windows 2000 and that this actually prevents conflicts. Microsoft recommend that you disable PnP OS in the BIOS when using ACPI. It also states that manual IRQ assignments in the BIOS are ignored when ACPI is enabled - if you need to do this disable ACPI in the BIOS before installing Windows 2000.

If you have problems with hardware not able to support this sharing of resources, then at present the best solution is to disable ACPI. [If you have a more elegant solution to this please email me!]. How to do this is described in the question above.

If you do not have ACPI enabled but still have problems with devices sharing IRQ's, you may also want to try disabling IRQ steering by selecting the Properties-IRQ Steering of the PCI Bus device under My Computer-Properties-Device Manager. Alternatively disabling "Get IRQ table using ACPI BIOS" on this tab may also help. If you have ACPI enabled then these options are not available as they do not form part of the ACPI standard.

gruss,
snowman