Diceman2037

Latest drivers on the subvendors website or the Chip/Codec vendors website?. Many people have the incorrect assumption that their subvendor will have the latest and greatest driver, which is most often not the case. The JMI sata drivers from gigabyte and asus for instance have not been updated on x48/x58 boards since 2009 (at the worst dating) which loses out on a number of idle spinwait fixes and bugs in the polling cycle in the very very latest, which can only be found by checking sites of other vendors (or going to station-drivers). Same can be said for Atheros network drivers. the latest drivers can not even be obtained from their official website directly (and older versions have DPC and BSOD issues with SP1). The most common DPC issue of late appears to be in the ntoskrnl executable, (which just happens to have gotten 2 or 3 important fixes lately). of late, many pci-e enabled mainboards aren't even letting windows handle the interrupt handling. Of course, you'd have to think awefully hard about using a subvendor who implements sharing on the main pci-e ports again, especially with a sata host.

This is potentially misleading. APIC and PCI-E provide most devices Virtual IRQ's anywhere from 1 to 300 under the NT6 kernel which came abouts with the removal of much of the hardware abstraction layer. Virtual IRQ sharing is often harmless for the most part. Inter-driver compatibility is the biggest culprit these days where hardware incompabilities are concerned. Now, if the user was running a PIC hal driver which restricts it to 17 (0-16) on Windows XP (which would prevent Multiprocessor/cores from working as a limitation of PIC) this would be something to immediately try and resolve. As for the Jmicron issue it was probably a very old driver that requires updating. depending if it was installed in ESATA mode or not, the driver might have been running an inefficient polling timer.