Apr 26, 2005 11:17 am Quickly reading over an article on the Dell website turned this up...
It may be possible to manually assign IRQ addresses through the BIOS to a device on an ACPI system board, but you will need to re-install the operating system again and force the selection of a Standard PC HAL during installation. If ACPI is enable, these BIOS settings are ignored in Windows. However, Dell does not recommend that you change the ACPI HAL that is installed during the Windows Setup process.
If the design of the device you are adding allows a range of IRQs to be used, it may be possible to free up an IRQ from an unused COM (serial) port or Universal serial bus (USB) port for re-mapping to the needed device, but this unused device resource would have to be disabled both in the operating system and in BIOS.
You are only able to manually configure resources in Windows when the Standard PC Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) is used, and even then you may not be able to configure the device. The device must support the ability to manually set the resources. When you change from the ACPI HAL to the Standard PC HAL, you must reinstall the operating system, and after doing so you will lose ACPI functionality.
The complete article can be found here support.dell.com/support/...p;s=gen&cs=