The first thing you should try is to disable one or both comm ports on the motherboard if you have a PS/2 mouse.
Here's the deal:
COM1 uses IRQ4
COM2 uses IRQ3
COM3 uses IRQ4
COM4 uses IRQ3
On occasion you will find some variation here, but the above is standard. Com ports 3 and 4 don't physically exist, but don't worry about that for now.
<ok, this crap can get long-winded so I've snipped a huge explaination and replaced it with the following>
Here's what you do if you have a PS/2 mouse and no serial devices (typical):
Get into your mobo's BIOS setup (hit del at startup usually) and DISABLE BOTH COM ports. Typically with today's applications and better technology (USB, etc), serial ports are unnecessary. Now you should have either IRQ 3 or IRQ 4 available. Hopefully your soundcard can use one of these.
Here's what you do if you have a Serial mouse:
Nothing. Ouch, eh? Your modem is going to hog either IRQ3 or IRQ4 and your mouse will be taking up the other one. (realize that modems are PHYSICAL com ports) Nothing you can do except get a PS/2 mouse (if your machine is capable) or get rid of the modem.
Some modems, especially 56K Winmodems, will hog 2 IRQs. They do some funky shit that the older modems do not. One thing you might try is to get rid of your fancy modem and find an older 33.6, which might turn out to be just as fast on standard telephone lines. (56K means little in the real world)
Another thing you can try is to look for devices that you aren't using that may be using up IRQ's. "If they're there, why ain't I using 'em?" Well, my motherboard comes with an additional ATA/66 controller built in. Now, since that's the ONLY controller I'm using, I can disable the other standard UDMA/33 controller (unless I ever have more than 4 devices).
Don't print? Don't have a parallel drive? Disable the parallel port which uses, I believe, IRQ 7. (this one is pretty standard so some devices won't let you set them to IRQ 7).
Slackmaster 2000
