Hardware interrupts

I've been having some problems with hardware interrupts. When I go into Process Explorer it's showing sometimes 10-30% CPU usage going to hardware interrupts. I've figured out which hardware is causing this. It is my Creative Audigy 2 ZS sound card. When I disable it in device manager, the interrupts cease to exist. My question is how do I fix this? I've installed what I assume to be the proper drivers because my sound does work, except I get these interrupts. How can I fix this?

Probably a problem with the driver - even if it's the RIGHT driver, it is not correct that interrupts take up more than 10% of your CPU time (at least not if you are not playing sound at the time - it still seems quite high when playing sound, but it is POSSIBLE).

It is quite likely that your driver is simply not doing the right thing for some reason.

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Mats

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Originally Posted by matsp

Probably a problem with the driver - even if it's the RIGHT driver, it is not correct that interrupts take up more than 10% of your CPU time (at least not if you are not playing sound at the time - it still seems quite high when playing sound, but it is POSSIBLE).

It is quite likely that your driver is simply not doing the right thing for some reason.

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Mats

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Well I've tried a number of different drivers from the Creative site and they all seem to cause these interrupts. They must have some really poor drivers. Also, it seemed like this all of a sudden happened out of nowhere, but I'm not sure why because I didn't modify anything sound related.

If you sound card has some kind of fault, it could be that the driver is attempting to work around it by switching into a different mode. For instance if the driver fails to obtain a DMA channel it will probably drop into PIO mode, which is going to cause zillions of interrupts.

Either it's a really crummy driver or your sound card is having issues.

It would only fail to do DMA if it was an ISA card - PCI is a Bus Master device, so it can not fail to achieve DMA access like it used to be with the ISA bus.

Ah: Havign said that, it's a PCMCIA card, isn't it? Then it makes sense that it may be in PIO mode.

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Mats

Ok, I think I got it now. I took it out, and tried it in a new PCI slot, but it still had the problem. So I found some new drivers and tried it, and now it works! Creative is very confusing with their drivers. I had to get them off a third-party site because Creative didn't have the right ones! :o