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The Question is: I am trying to add a second IEEE-488 card (ISA bus) to my Digital 433au PWS. The procedure to add an ISA device is to use the "isacfg" utility to set the slot number, IRQ#, dma chan#, and base I/O address. Unfortunately, the "show config" command invoked from the boot prompt indicates that all available IRQs are used up. For this reason, I used "isacfg" to remove a device called "ES1888" to free up an IRQ for my second IEEE-488 card. I was informed that the "ES1888" is a sound card and not needed by the s ystem. Unfortunately, the system now crashes at random times, sometimes within minutes and other times after several hours, after I start up a particular application. By crash I mean the monitor is blank and the PWS is unresponsive to keyboard commands or the PW S resets to the boot prompt. It is becoming evident to me that the application, may in fact, "need" the device that I removed and that the device may not be a sound card afterall. Question: The device that I removed is of type "Embedded" as indicated using the "show config" command. May I remove a device type "Embedded"? Is it safe to assume that devices of type "Embedded" cannot be removed? The Answer is : Embedded indicates the capability is implemented on the motherboard, and the DECwindows keyboard (among other users) expects to have a sound device. (This is how the keyboard bell is implemented.) You must free an(other) IRQ using isacfg (after re-configuring the sound), or re-configure and then move to a PCI-based card -- it would clearly appear that the additional card or the removal of the sound device has destabilized the system. (You are now also aware of why ISA and EISA buses were replaced -- Q-bus CSR and vector settings are approximately equally painful to manage. This in addition to the low performance of the ISA or EISA (or Q-bus) bus, of course.) The OpenVMS Wizard would move to a PCI-based IEEE 488, or to a network-based connection.
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