freezing keyboard

[Austin Newton]

Lately I've been having a problem with my keyboard freezing up on me for
no apparent reason. It is an old 486, without much memory. I recently
intstalled an Ethernet Card and I thought perhaps there was a conflict
between that and something else. Any information or advice on how to
fix the problem would be greatly appreciated.

[Austin Newton]

[Jack Schidt]

If you also have a sound card, you likely have an interrupt conflict.

Soundbalaster emulation uses irq5, and likely your E-Net card is trying to
as well. 8 bit network cards are a pain if you have a loaded system: 2 com
ports (IRQ 3,4), printer port (IRQ 7), sound card (IRQ 5), and VGA card (IRQ
2 SOMETIMES). The system uses IRQs 0,1,and 6 (floppy), leaving you a grand
total of one eight-bit interrupt free without a sound card- irq5. If you
have two printer ports, you will also lose IRQ 5.

Solution:

Remove the E-Net card, and bring up Windows control panel, hardware manager,
or look at the documentation that came with the E-Net card and the Sound
card.. See what IRQ resources are used. Choose an unused interrupt for the
E-Net card, if possible, or lose the SoundBlaster card, and go to a Windows
Sound System compatible card, which uses the UPPER interrupts (usually IRQ
10) that everyone forgets about. This frees up IRQ 5, and you can set the
E-Net card to that.

Sixteen bit E-Net cards will also allow the upper interrupts to be used, and
should also be considered. The upper [16 bit] interrupts are free with the
exception of IRQs 8, 9, 13, 14, and sometimes 15 [CD or secondary HD's]-
this leaves IRQs 10,11,12 as nearly always free.

Lastly, the I/O port address, or memory address of the E-Net card could be
conflicting with
something. If your card needs a memory address, set it to D000, and disable
L2 cache in this region [this is in the computer's BIOS SETUP]. I/O port
conflicts are less likely, and will require additional looking if you are
not up and working after all this.

Remember to setup the E-Net card's driver to reflect the correct IRQ port,
I/O address, and memory address [if used] to match any changes.

I have often thought of giving away SoundBlaster cards and network cards as
Xmas presents to my enemies.

Good Luck

Austin Newton wrote in message <36106B...@email.byu.edu>...