A friend of mine has been having trouble with his PC among other things he seems to have a dodgy IDE channel. If his CDWriter is placed on the secondary channel it doesnt function correctly and freezes the PC, it won't install a whole piece of software. I lent him my copy of SiSoft Sandra and it came up with a couple of things that are strange it warned that he had a 'disabled host controller' and also about 7 things use the IRQ 11 I remember back in the day this used to be a bad thing but not sure if it still matters in this plug and play era. Sorry to waffle but im just trying to set the scene best I can, I'm going to have a look at it so any help would be much appreciated. Basically - any idea what this 'disabled host controller' is; and whether that or the dodgy IRQ settings would contribute to a malfunctioning drive on the second channel or a PC that crashes loads. His Specs (off top of my head) 300W PSU Elite mo-bo w/ VIA chipset (K7VZA ?) AMD Athlon 1400 512MB SDRAM 40GB HDD FireWire card Oh running Windows XP EDIT: Tried installing latest 4in1 drivers from VIA - no change.
have you tried going to the BIOS? and seeing if you could find something to do with IRQ's? I'm sure there's something there. As I use, to have the K7VZA montherboard, if that is the one, he has?
First off, the IRQ thing: that's due to ACPI under Windows 2000 and XP. It's not a problem. 2nd, I've heard that the particular board is a little particular about the PSU used. If it's a good one, such as Antec, Sparkle, or Enermax, you probably can get away with that 300W.
Thanks for help I'm guessing its a dodgy-botcho-generic one from the computer fair he bought the comp at, I take it a higher wattage would be preferable? Any ideas what a 'disabled host controller' may be referring to or is this as vague as it sounds?