I have a Dell Optiplex GX150 system. I know Dell's arent the best, but im fixing it up for my brother to use for work/a little bit of light gaming.

Specs:
Pentium III 1gHZ Coppermine core
384MB PC133 SDRAM
DVDRW drive
Sound Blaster Live 24bit sound
Floppy disk drive
USB 2.0 add on card
Nvidia GeForce 6200 AGP video card, 245mb VRAM

When i try to run a program that uses audio and video at the same time, i.e. use the iTunes visualizer while playing music, the screen goes black, and sometimes comes back after a few seconds, sometimes i have to force-reboot the system to get it back on. I looked at the Device Manager (screen attached) and it says my Sound card and Video card are on the same IRQ line, even though i have several IRQ's free of anything. When i went to change it in Dev. Manager, it wouldnt let me. all the settings were grayed out. I then went to change it in the Dell BIOS (version a11) and when i changed the IRQ of one device, it changed the IRQ of the other as well to match it. SO if i changed the IRQ on the Video, it changes the IRQ of the Sound to match. It does this with several other devices as well, i.e. the IDE /USB controllers and LAN. Why does it do this? The BIOS has no setting to enable/disable Plug n Play, or i would have tried that. All onboard devices except for ports and LAN are disabled (sound video etc)
. Im very experienced with computers (been building and upgrading/repairing them for 5 years) and this has me totally baffled. Any help is greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance
TJ

i meant 256mb vram on the video card, but it shouldnt matter for this problemo
-tj

Hi Teej

What PCI slot is the sound card in?
Creative cards love to have their own dedicated slot...and as such, most motherboards have supported this...it's PCI slot number 3. The slots are counted from where the CPU is as slot 1...however, there is normally an AGP slot first, and then PCI 1, PCI2, etc etc.


PS. Dells are fine

The video card is in the AGP slot, and the Creative card sits on a riser board that connects to its own special slot. Its set up as follows:
AGP slot----empty PCI slot-----Riser Board---
----Sound card-------
----USB 2.0 Card------- (both on riser board)

i switched the slots between the USB and sound cards, because i dont have a PCI slot 3. ... i have 2 slots numbered 1 and one slot 2. This solved the problem though!! thank you!

hey teej,

glad to hear that you solved your problem

marked as fixed

genie3251