First post, by WildW
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Hello folks, wondering if anyone has any wisdom to share on hardware that generates a lot of interrupts...let me explain that better.
I just picked up an old Shutle computer with P4 (Northwood) 2.8GHz and an AGP HD4650 (XFX with DDR2). It was originally running Windows 7 but I changed out the hard disk and installed Windows XP. I struggled to find drivers for the Radeon that would work. The drivers from the AMD site don't detect the card, but I read forum posts that suggested manually selecting a driver through Device manager once the AMD drivers had been unpacked. This worked and the card seemed to run normally with all resolutions now available.
However I soon noticed that I had really high CPU usage (about 70% to 80%), and no processes in Task Manager seemed to be causing them. I downloaded Process Explorer and sure enough it was almost entirely "Hardware Interrupts" eating the CPU, and it did seem to be causing real slowdown of the system. I've seen this sort of thing before, not sure exactly when or where, but enough to suspect "interrupts" and to check with Process Explorer. Before when this happened with an old machine I narrowed it down to using a PS/2 keyboard and mouse, and using USB ones instead made the problem go away. . . but that didn't help this time. What made the sky-high interrupts go away was removing the Radeon 4650.
I'm not sure if Windows 7 had the same issue. I'd like to verify if the card is working properly so I may try it again with the Windows 7 installation the machine came with. But as for XP, any ideas what's happening? Is this an issue that will go away once a "good" driver is installed for the card, or is it perhaps a Windows XP issue? Perhaps it doesn't like the PC it's in, but another machine will not suffer the same interrupt hell, with XP or 7 . . . I can/will try these things, but does anyone have any thoughts?
