Blue screen of death - IRQ conflict.

tomstickland

Now that I've got the wireless network working 90% of the time I've found another problem. I've had a Blue screen of death a few times. The message was "DRIVER_IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL", so I immediatley pointed the blame at IRQ (interrupt requests) for hardware. I've been through all of the hardware items and found that the wireless card was using IRQ 9 and a Yamaha Native DS1 WDM Driver was also using IRQ 9. I tried disabling and renabling the Yamaha item but the IRQ still came back as 9. I've turned this item off for now. I guess it's some sort of sound driver? It's listed under Sound, Video and game controllers.

I'll read the help and support files, but meanwhile would appreciate any tips on resolving the IRQ conflict.

tomstickland

OK, I've read the help files and now run msinfo32.exe and it's showing 4 items on IRQ 9
Microsoft ACPI-compliant system
Intel (r) 82371AB/EB PCI to USB Universal Host Controller
Yamaha Native DS1 WDM driver
Belkin 802.11g Wireless Card

Is it worth removing the card and trying another PCI slot?

Chippy_Minton

The BSOD should also tell you the filename of the driver which caused the crash, along with memory addresses - these all help in tracing the culprit.

It's probably a conflict between the drivers for those devices, so try Scanning for hardware changes and/or Update Driver within Device Manager. If that doesn't fix it, try another PCI slot as you suggest.

Devices can share the same IRQ - for example my graphics card and 2 USB Universal host controllers all use PCI IRQ 16, and my sound card and another USB controller share another IRQ.

You can see a list of IRQs in Device Manager if you click View - Resources by Type and then expand Interrupt Request.

tomstickland

I've got about 5 unused PCI slots, so isn't that the easiest way to proceed? I can't manually edit the IRQ settings.

I'll wait until it happens again and look for more info on the screen.

tomstickland

Culprit is RT2500.sys
I've done a Google search on it and it's wireless networking related.

Actually, there's two copies of it.
C:\windows\system32\drivers
C:\program files\Belkin\Belkin 802.11g blah blah blah utility\Driver

Is that not good?

From the inf file

This installation script supports Windows 98,Me,2000 & XP for the
; Ralink RT2500 series Wireless LAN Card.

Hence the name LOL.

tomstickland

I uninstalled the wireless card, rebooted, and then put it into another slot. It's now on IRQ 10 and that's not shared with anything else. See how it goes now.