I have a Dell Inspiron 8200, and am beginning to have problems with my video card. Every now and then, particularly if I flex the case in any way but sometimes when I'm not even touching it, the display will begin to flicker. This often crashes the laptop. A rough guess is that it's a bad AGP connector on the motherboard.

Okay this sounds like it has nothing to do with the topic. I noticed two things recently. One, the flicker happens more often when I'm moving the cordless mouse or using a USB card reader. Two, the video card, USB hub, and practially everything else shares IRQ 11.

# cat /proc/interrupts
CPU0
0: 452999 XT-PIC timer
1: 1953 XT-PIC i8042
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
7: 919 XT-PIC Intel 82801CA-ICH3
8: 2 XT-PIC rtc
9: 0 XT-PIC acpi
11: 185813 XT-PIC ohci1394, uhci_hcd:usb1, uhci_hcd:usb2, ndiswrapper, nvidia
12: 663 XT-PIC i8042
14: 27452 XT-PIC ide0

(This is after removing pcmcia modules which were also using 11)

Everything I've read about avoiding IRQ conflicts involves setting "plug-n-play OS" to false in the BIOS, shuffling cards, removing conflicting devices such as the parallel port, and clearing ECSD. With the Dell BIOS I can't do any of these things except disable the lpr and serial ports.

Still on a hunch that lessening the IRQ sharing would be a good thing, I'm at a loss for how to do it. I'm using udev, hotplug, HAL, etc. I'm not convinced, though, that anything in the linux kernel or beyond will help with IRQ assignment. Please tell me I'm wrong!