"slow" ide interface = faulty sound?

[Herbert Ho]

i'm currently running 2.2.14 on an el-cheapo(tm) compaq presario that
has a ess 1888 sound card on the motherboard.

for about 1.5 years i've been having trouble playing sound files under
linux.  it worked somewhat under 2.0.x but died under 2.2.x.

the sound will play for a while, but it seems that when any other
process reads from the hard drive, it will die and give me a dma
timeout.  an unfortunate side effect of this is my floppy drives
ceases to work, forcing a reboot.

i've contacted both sound driver authors.  i've been told the dma
timeout can possibly be the result of a "slow" ide interface.  also
the lost of my floppy drive can be the result of dma or irq not being
freed properly.  i guess i'll leave that to you guys. =)

another neat twist in this tale: my bios (compaq brand) reports the
sound card on irq 5.  but the driver refuses to begin playing unless i
specify the irq=7.

/dev/sndstat, syslog, and messages don't point to any problems.  i use
the sb driver (tried both as module and in kernel).

thanks in advance,

herbert