"If Mark's fiddling with his Tekram card finally got Hardware Manager to see his printer, I'll bet your problems are because of your sound card," quacks The Duck, looking through my email.

"You nitwit," says I, "the sound card has nothing to do with my network card! And get out of my email!"

So Mr. Quackers hops off the chair, stroddles over to the tall tower wherein grinds the hardware, grabs the TidalWave 128 sound card with his beak and gives it a yank. Out it slides, and El Ducko drops it on the floor.

"The power's still on!" I shriek.

A quick peck on the Reset button and the machine reboots. We watch the screen. No error messages. No shared IRQs. And DHCPMON reports a valid IP address lease.

"See?" quacks The Quacker, who heads out the back door for the pool.

A quick review of the IRQ table shows why the machine now works. The TidalWave 128 is an ISA PnP card and was always given two IRQs, 7 and 9 (probably one for sound and one for MIDI, though I'm not sure). For some reason, this particular Award BIOS won't use all the other available IRQs for the PCI PnP cards, and puts all of the PCI PnP's on one single shared IRQ. But with the TidalWave gone, the IRQs are now assigned as 9, 10, 11 and 12 (for the scsi, video, usb port and nic, respectively).

Stupid Duck.

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