Fedora Core 4 with the standard 2.6.14.2 kernel with the LSM module. A (in no way) comprehensive search yields that rtirq is a patch, possibly only to the 2.4 kernel. I am going a different route: I would like to update my BIOS first and see if I get more control over the BIOS that way. As of now I have IDE control and the option to turn off three things and that is it. I THINK my motherboard chipset is SiS755 and I found the sis755MAX.bin file so that SHOULD work... On boot my BIOS ID# is 63-0100-000001-00101111-071504-SiS755-258KA000-Y2KC, and though I cannot find the exact match for that number there is the SiS755 portion which corresponds with the chipset and the host controller for my machine. Weither or not chipset and host controler are the same as motherboard - who knows... And to that end I have a question: My laptop has no floppy drive: is there a way to boot DOS from CD without any memory management drivers loaded so that I can flash my BIOS? I have looked into FreeDOS, and sent one of their developers an email, but just to cover my bases has anyone here solved such a problem before (and if so, how please)? If I cannot do this I might find where my modem is enabled or where drivers are built for it in the kernel and rebuild the kernel without thoes drivers. I may have been dreaming but I seem to remember a previous kernel running on this machine without having to disable acpi when the modem was not loaded. Thanks again for the help! Lee, we could put this despute to rest if you have a machine with that latency timer module Takashi Iwai (I think) wrote. You could run the kernel latency tests with shared IRQ's and without (somehow?) It seems to me like IRQ reordering could help but I have only one semester studying the x86 architecture under my belt. Anyway, if Intel and Microsoft cam up with something it has to be buggy, right? ;) -thewade