Win XP Success!

[bhugh]

Hi all,

I just spent all afternoon messing around with WinXP and my EWS64XL. It was a long, annoying process but in the end it really does work! The EWS64 with the Win2000/NT drivers works under WinXP just as it would under 2000/NT.

For several hours I received the terrible "red exclamation point" in the Device Manager (under "control panel/system/hardware") for the Digital Control, the Synthesizer, and sometimes the Midi2.

At first I was chalking this up to some mysterious WinXP quirks or compatibility issues. But it turns out that they were nothing of the sort--they were simple, run-of-the-mill IRQ conflicts that Plug-n-play wasn't able to resolve.

If you have a EWS64, a modem, a network card, a video card, some hard drives, and so on, you have an IRQ shortage. If your system is like mine, it will take some IRQ management on your part before all these IRQ-hogging devices can get along together.

You can troubleshoot IRQ conflicts rather easily in WinXP by going to "Device Manager", clicking on the "view" menu, and choosing "view resources by type". Double-click on "Interrupt Request (IRQ)" and you will be able to see right away which of your EWS's IRQs are conflicting with other system device's IRQs.

I resolved the conflicts by using the "ewsconf.exe" utility (part of the EWS's Win2000 software, by default in directory "c:/ews64_2k") to set the EWS's IRQs the way I needed them in order to avoid conflicts.

I ended up with WSS I/O=534, IRQ=5, Play DMA=1, ReadDMA=0, FM i/i=388, SBBi/o=220, Gamei/o=201, Midi1i/o=310, irq=11 Midi2i/o=330, irq=7, digital ctrli/o=328. (These settings may or may not work for you--they are simply the ones that avoided conflicts on my system.)

Then I went into BIOS & set irqs 5, 7, and 11 and DMA 0 & 1 as "reserved for legacy isa". Then I selected the BIOS option that makes PnP reset & recalculate all its IRQs and rebooted the computer.

I avoided assigning IRQ 9 to anything on the EWS because I heard that on some motherboards, IRQ9 and isa boards don't get along well. IRQ9 is used by PCI board in my final setup.

I had to go through several cycles of this (change EWS64 setup, then change BIOS setup, then re-boot, then check the results in Device Manager) before getting a combination that worked.

You might be able to get the same result by setting everything on the EWS to "PNP" and then resetting PNP in Bios and re-booting (perhaps doing this several times until PnP finally picks a combination that actually works). This didn't work for me, but I have a rather full system (all IRQs are in use now and one is shared between network card and USB port--we'll see how that works out . . . ).

At any rate, I'm pretty sure once these IRQ conflicts are solved the EWS64 Win2000/NT drivers work just fine in WinXP. I haven't tested it really, really thoroughly, but so far the codec plays fine, EWS Wave Play 1-6 play fine, I can select analog in, coax in, optical in, etc. All EWS software works and other software (CoolEdit Pro, MS FlightSim) appears to be working fine with the EWS.

So I'm guessing that the problems, if there are any, will be the same as those found using the EWS64 under Win2000, but not any particularly nefarious problems specific to WinXP.

I do have EWS 64XL hardware version 1.2 (which, as others have pointed out here, seems necessary for the Win2000 drivers to work).

I'd be interested to hear others' reports, but I'll bet that many of the problems reported in this forum with WinXP installation are simple IRQ conflicts. Solve the conflicts and the drivers will work.


--Brent Hugh
[email protected]


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[Boye]

Just what I needed - living proof that there's still possibility of using EWS MIDI another two years! I am definetly going to try this out...after kicking out all the other boards in my PC ;>

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[bhugh]

Here are a couple of other ideas that *might* help when installing EWS64 in WinXP:

1. When I went into "Device Manager" and looked at "Ports/ECP Printer Port" and then clicked on "Port Settings" there are choices about interrupts for the printer port. You can save an interrupt by selecting "Never use an interrupt". For my computer, this was checked automatically when WinXP was installed. But it's worth checking.

2. I also saved an interrupt by disabling Com1 in BIOS & in Device Manager. I'm not sure how much this really helps (no other device stepped in and used this interrupt--although you might be able to assign it to the EWS64 using Ewsconf.exe).

3. You can set your EWS64 interrupts using Ewsconf.exe in your ews64_2k subdirectory. Then if necessary, go into BIOS & reserve those interrupts as "legacy/ISA" so (theoretically!) PnP devices will stay away from them. Then if you need to, keep a record of which interrupts you have setup up using Ewsconf.exe and in Device Manager, manually set the properties of your EWS devices to use the interrupts/memory areas that you have specified in ewsconf.exe. (This is basically the process I outlined in my first post on this subject).

Then (and here's the trick!) if you still have conflicts between EWS and some other PnP device, DO NOT uninstall the problematic EWS component in "Device Manager" (even though this is what the "helpful" WinXP hardware installation helper keeps telling you to do). Rather, *uninstall the OTHER hardware device that is interfering with the EWS device.*

(Remember that you can check which devices have conflicting IRQs by looking at "Device Manager" and selecting "View/Resources by type" then expanding the tree labeled "IRQ".)

Then re-boot the computer (which will re-install the device automatically), and when it re-detects & re-installs the device, winxp will (usually) install it in such as way as to avoid conflicts with the EWS64.

4. You could also try installing some EWS components "IRQ-less" using ewsconf.exe. I haven't tried this myself and some others here have pointed out disadvantages of this approach. But if your problem is IRQ conflicts, this is at least a potential solution.


In general, my impression is that the EWS64 in WinXP is just a little less "slick" than under Win95/98/ME (the EWS control panel isn't quite as neat, for example). But so far everything that is advertised to work in Win2000/NT works in WinXP for me.

--Brent

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