System resources are the communications channels, addresses, and other signals hardware devices use to communicate on the bus. At their lowest level, these resources typically include the following:

• Memory addresses

• IRQ (interrupt request) channels

• DMA (direct memory access) channels

• I/O port addresses

I have listed these roughly in the order you would experience problems with them. Memory conflicts are perhaps the most troublesome of these and certainly the most difficult to fully explain and overcome.

IRQs cause more problems than DMAs because they are in much higher demand; virtually all cards use IRQ channels. Fewer problems exist with DMA channels because fewer cards use them, DMA channels are used only by the obsolete ISA standard, and there are usually more than enough channels to go around.

I/O ports are used by all hardware devices on the bus, but there are technically 64KB of them, which means there are plenty to go around. With all these resources, you must ensure that a unique card or hardware function uses each resource; in most cases they cannot or should not be shared.

These resources are required and used by many components of your system. Adapter cards need these resources to communicate with your system and accomplish their purposes. Not all adapter cards have the same resource requirements.

A serial communications port, for example, needs an IRQ channel and I/O port address, whereas a sound card needs these resources and at least one DMA channel. Most network cards use an IRQ channel and an I/O port address, and some also use a 16KB block of memory addresses.

As your system increases in complexity, the chance for resource conflicts increases. Modern systems with several additional devices can really push the envelope and become a configuration nightmare for the uninitiated.

Sometimes under these situations the automatic configuration capability of Plug and Play can get confused or fail to optimally configure resources so that everything will work.

Most adapter cards enable you to modify resource assignments by using the Plug and Play software that comes with the card or the Device Manager in Windows 9x and later, thus you can sometimes improve on a default configuration by making some changes.

Even if the automatic configuration gets confused (which happens more often than it should), fortunately, in almost all cases a logical way to configure the system exists—once you know the rules.