Sound and Audio devices sharing IRQ numbers, high hardware interrupts, laggy video

Question

After a fresh reinstall of Windows XP SP2, and re installation of my drivers from their official sites, my computer has been experiencing speed problems after a day or so of being on.

After opening Process Explorer when the computer seems slow, I notice that the Hardware Interrupts process continually using 40 - 50% CPU usage.

Streaming video, from Youtube, also loses frame rate and the loading of applications, operation of Chrome, and MSN all seem to slow down.

These symptoms start to appear after I have left my computer on for a day or two.

I have checked my Primary and Secondary IDE channels, they aren't in PIO only transfer mode, so I ruled that out.

After sorting devices by type in the device manager, I noticed that my Video and Audio device share the same IRQ number and was wondering if this could be causing my problems and if there are any ways to fix this? (My graphics are integrated I believe)

Here is a link to a small screenshot of my device manager: http://filesmelt.com/dl/devicemanager.JPG

Answer 1

You could try to disabling the floppy, the USB ports, or turn off assigning IRQ to VGA in your BIOS. To free an irq and to hope they will be reassigned. Or disable the (integrated) sound card itself to test your system without it...

If your graphic or sound card aren't integrated (and there's no warranty sticker...), you could move one of them to a different PCI slot.

But from my knowledge it's not really an issue. You should:

1. double check that you use the appropriate drivers
2. trying to disable/unplug all your dispensable device one by one.
3. scan your computer for malware
4. removing all software which have drivers one by one. e.g. antivirus, virtual device, ...
5. removing the drivers of the indispensable device (and trying with windows default drivers, older or alternative)
6. try alternative hardware one by one

(Updated)