What is probably happening

What to do

Too many devices using IRQs

There are two approaches to this:

1. The old approach is to convert your hard drives and CD-ROM to SCSI. Doing so will free up IRQs and pave the way for a huge performance boost.

2. The new approach is to use faster new EIDE hard drives, and convert your various devices to USB (rather than run them from PCI cards). This frees up IRQs and paves the way for a huge performance boost.

Need to display your IRQ list? In Windows NT, run the NT Diagnostics applet (go to START, PROGRAM, then ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS to get to it), and click on the RESOURCES tab. Other Windows versions have a similar method. Use Windows Help to see what it is.