A. With more and more people upgrading their PC these days, upgrade problems are some of the most common complaints that I hear about. The problem is that new  devices are often poorly configured, and they try to use the same "resources" that that are used by another device already in the system. The word "resources" usually  means interrupt (or IRQ) lines, direct memory access (or DMA) channels, and  input/output (or I/O) addresses. For example, suppose you have a printer port on  your computer using IRQ7, then you add a sound board which is also using IRQ7 -  you wind up with a hardware conflict, and often neither the printer port OR sound  board will work until you find and resolve the conflict.

When planning an upgrade, you need to know which resources are used, and which ones are free. Then you can configure your new device to use the free resources. Fortunately, there are some good tools to help you. Start with MSD by Microsoft.  It's in MS-DOS (up to 6.22), or you can download it from the Microsoft web site at              http://www.microsoft.com (look for the file GA0363.EXE which is MSD version 2.11). Best of all, it's FREE. If you'd rather go with a commercial diagnostic, check out TuffTest by Windsor Technologies at http://www.tufftest.com.