Help with IRQs/IRQ sharing in WinNT 4.0

[Johnny Ray]

Here's the situation. I'm using a Dell Optiplex NT workstation (what a turd!) to control a mass spectrometer, which requires two network cards (one to the spectrometer, the other to the LAN), and a PCI GPIB card (for DAC). I added an Adaptec AH2930 to connect a Plextor 12/4/32 burner (these are amazing!) to back up rediculously large amounts of data. The potential problem: the GPIB is on IRQ9, one network (the important one which controls the spectrometer) on IRQ10, and the SCSI card and the LAN card sharing IRQ11. The SCSI card/CD burner works great, but frequently when I'm send large amounts of data over the LAN via FTP, the transfer hangs (not a crash), so it seems like an IRQ problem. This obviously limits my success at unattended data transfer. It's not the FTP/network, because this works fine on other computers. If I remove the IDE CD on IRQ15, will the BIOS put the SCSI card here?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Since this is a new $250,000 (US) instrument, I don't have a lot of lattitude for experimentation, and thought I'd turn to real experts first!

John

[Chucky Cheese]

jonny ray,

we use isa based gpibs' primarily in some of our systems and they seem to be slot sensitive(..i know it sound ridiculous). i'm not familiar with that dell system but have you tried putting it in a "higher order" slot? you might want to try and adjust any latency values in the bios, lower is better for network cards(..mine is set at 96, don't go to low though, low is 32 and high is 248). the setting might be called "pci slot 1 latency __", that's what is in my bios anyways.

if anything is starting up in the startup folder you can "load order" them by prefixing the file name with a 1, 2...etc.

chucky