Even I need to ask questions sometimes. Whether or not anyone can answer them is another story.

First some background: I go technical support for PCs over the phone, so I can't see exactly what the customer sees.

1. I was trying to change the driver that an ATI Radeon 9800 used in Device Manager. I had the cust do the update driver option, and then choose the driver from a list. It showed only 2 ATI drivers for the 9800. Unchecking the box for "show compatible devices only" showed more drivers, but still only ATI drivers. Is there a way to force a video card to use the Microsoft Standard SVGA Display adapter in XP?

2. Is there a way to get Windows to re-assign a device's IRQ if the change setting is unavailable? The video card was also on a software IRQ, and the problem he was having was only happening in Windows. It was also a problem in safe mode. So we had eliminated IRQ 7 for the parallel port in the BIOS and then disabled the parallel port in Windows but Windows did not change the IRQ for the video card to 7, it was still on 16. Any ideas?

I won't be offended if no one can figure it out.

1) You could try uninstalling the driver, disabling plug n' play and install a different one on reboot.

2) Not quite sure, I believe there is a way to force IRQ's but I haven't done it since my 98 days.

Good Luck regardless.

1. The BIOS did not have a "PnP OS" option in it.

I didn't figure out another idea (I went through about 20 things) until after the call. And that was to uninstall the driver, cancel the reboot request and then install one using the Add/Remove Hardware thing. Of course I would have to had copied down all the resources, then tell it to use IRQ 7. It is really a moot point at the moment, because when he calls back (I told him to get the updated driver) he will probably get set up for a repair.

2. The BIOS did not really have many settings in it. It did not even have the ability to disable the parallel port, much less assign IRQs manually. And XP works a bit differently.

1. Download ATI latest driver package. Uninstall the current video driver and then install your downloaded drivers.

2. I do not know how to force IRQs, I wish I did.