I wish there was a way to retract a post.

I thought there was. I've seen other places on this board where posts were deleted by their authors. Maybe it just doesn't allow you to do it for the top-level parent of a thread because that would screw up the indexing or something.

I never did understand why the ports default in pairs on an unsharable resource like an IRQ.

Because it dates back to the good old days when the IBM engineers couldn't imagine why any personal computer would need more than 16 interrupt handlers, or would need to access more than two COM ports at the same time. Or why anyone would need more than 640k of RAM...

But I've always installed modems as COM3 with an unused IRQ usually 5 or 7

And I've done that sort of thing in the past, too. But I stopped doing it when I started getting conflicts in certain DOS games that assumed my SoundBlaster card was on either 5 or 7, and I needed the printer port to be on one of those IRQs as well. I used to spent a lot of time IRQ juggling. The only reason I brought it up was because I didn't know you were an expert and already understood this stuff.

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Tony Fabris