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Just curious, when installing 2k/xp do you enable or disable "plug n play os" setting in the bios. I've heard somewhere that it is recommended to disable it for 2k/xp but I'm not sure why. I am assuming it has to do with hardware allocation. Along the same lines, do you enable ACPI in bios. Just not sure how these two setting interact. Any explanation would be greatly appreciated.
If you leave acpi enabled, you get all the hardware power manangement 2k/xp have. If you turn PnP OS On in addition, 2k/xp will usually end up assigned most if not all your peripherals to a single IRQ(usually not a problem, but some devices you may have may not like sharing IRQ's all that much). If you turn PnP OS to off, the OS will use the IRQ's the BIOS assigns to the cards, and this can be used to give some or all of your cards their own IRQ.
Thanks for the info. I kind of thought that was the case, but always left PnP enabled just in case. I've really never had a major problem with IRQ sharing, but next time I do a clean install I'll probably disable it anyway.