Hi Guys,
 
I've been working away building a "new" DAW system (dual W2K and XP based with Intel motherboard) and was just about done, merely awaiting a Firewire card to be delivered, when suddenly I realized the entire effort may be headed for serious trouble.  It has been a long while since I built a DAW and assumed that motherboards still allowed for configuring IRQ's like most did "back in the day".  Well, looking in Device Manager I just realized a LOT of things are all lumped on the same IRQ.  I immediately went into the BIOS and ..... there is no way to adjust ANYTHING about the device IRQ's.  ARGH!!   What have I got myself into?  At the moment it looks like both PCI slots (where the firewire audio card and another audio card will go), the onboard video, onboard audio and one USB port are ALL ON THE SAME IRQ (16).   I'm thinking this cannot possibly be safe.
 
Should I throw in the towel on this system and start over with a higher end mother board that has at least one PCI slot not sharing any interrupt tie-line and has the IRQ controls necessary in the BIOS?  
 
Sonic

W2K and XP are a in corner for sure.
(never to come out again IMO).

It seems unlikely to me that the IRQs wouldn't be automatically handled to NOT be on the same number. But I share your frustration about hopelessly crippled BIOSes that you sometimes encounter. Unfortunately I also agree that this venture is an exercise in futility because of W2K/XP. I can't make you choose a current OS but one of the consequences of using such an outdated system is a considerable lack of support.

W2K and XP aren't the problem, I only mentioned that in case there was something that could be done under those OS's.
 
Yeah, I don't understand mass piling onto the same IRQ either, but apparently it can happen.  This is what occurs when people try to make machine people-proof.  The whole PnP concept was borked from day one IMO, at least regarding the whole interrupt/IRQ buss situation.  

I didn't mean they were the problem, just that official support channels have closed and virtually no advanced user today is still using XP. I hope you fix it though. Have you noticed any actual issues or is it just a worry for now? I don't think I've had to manually manage IRQs since Win95, or possibly 3.1.

I recently changed my system board and was shocked to find a setting to reserve an IRQ for a com port in the bios. I haven't seen that in a long time. However, I haven't had an issue with the virtual IRQ's either.
 
It has been a while since I had XP but IIRC you can reserve/define/config the first four com ports in the control panel. Also, most software I have seen that supports com ports allows you to select one as well.

XP will dynamically assign IRQs, and will renegotiate them as needed. Manually overriding them is a minefield, and they are best left for the OS to manage. I do not recall ever needing to manually set an IRQ in XP.

One other thought crossed my mind...what about PCIe ?  There is one PCIe slot, maybe I should get a PCIe Firewire card instead?   I'm not entirely up on all this but I think maybe PCIe would  "separate" the card from any PCI device interrupt/IRQ collisions?
 
Did I mention I hate computers?

 I don't think I would risk today's hardware on an XP/W2K system.  I think I still have some Socket A pieces and P4 pieces.  One of these days I've thought of slapping back together my Athlon XP system and run W2K. That is my favorite OS.

It's not today's hardware, it's using an Intel board circa 2012-ish (I think) that still has driver support for W2K & XP.  Works awesome.  I reconstructed the thing using onboard audio until I got everything figured out and was prepping for the final step of putting a firewire card in for the audio interface and that's when I suddenly realized there's a potential problem with the way the mobo and OS are mapping/handling devices.