[nflug] POS BIOS

[Cyber Source]

Ok, gotta throw one out for some help.
  Long story short is, I have a laptop that I just purchased for a 
client, has nvidia and runs perfect with Ubuntu Gutsy except for 1 
little (kinda huge) problem.
  The bios that ships with most laptops lately , COMPLETELY SUCK  (I 
hate phoenix). There is absolutely NOTHING in the bios to help control 
acpi or apic. My problem is that I have NO SOUND unless I boot with the 
kernel boot option of "acpi=off", then all works perfect except I have 
no battery monitoring, which on a laptop is pretty huge, if this was a 
desktop, it would be no biggie (not sure if it would affect ups 
monitoring). I notice that I have ERR=1 from /proc/interrupts. I have 
tried all sorts of combinations of boot options, including "noapic 
nolapic pnpbios=off" and I forget the rest I've tried, nothing works 
except for turning off acpi completely and then no battery monitor. I've 
looked into apm but can't recompile the kernel because then all the 
other "restricted" packages won't work with the custom kernel and that 
option is basically a pain in the ass. I feel this is probably related 
to the ERR=1 from interrupts but I can't seem to clear this, it only 
gets worse with other boot options I've tried.
Does anyone know how to reroute irq's or make them behave better (yes 
I've tried pci=routeirq)?
Has anyone else had this problem and found a solution?
Currently my work around is 2 grub boot stanza's, one is to have sound 
which runs "acpi=off" and the other is to have no sound and everything 
else works (battery monitor), without the "acpi=off" option.
Any help please? TIA