Device Management

Plug and Play is a combination of the system BIOS, hardware devices, system resources, device drivers, and the operating system software. This combination provides for dynamic installation and configuration of new hardware components with little or no manual intervention.

You can install Plug and Play devices by plugging in the device. For other devices, such as Plug and Play Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) cards, turn off the computer to install the device, then restart the computer to initialize the device.

Plug and Play allows users to do the following:

• Insert and remove Plug and Play devices such as PC Cards without having to configure them.

• Connect to or disconnect from a docking station or network without restarting the computer or changing configuration parameters.

• Add a new monitor or USB keyboard by plugging it in and turning it on.

Plug and Play support depends on both the hardware device and the device driver. A legacy device can gain some benefit by using a Plug and Play driver. For example, an ISA sound card or an Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) network adapter can be manually installed and gain some Plug and Play functionality by means of a Plug and Play driver.

If a driver does not support Plug and Play, its devices behave as non–Plug and Play devices, regardless of hardware Plug and Play support.

Table 19.1 shows how the level of Plug and Play for a device depends on hardware and software.

Table 19.1 Plug and Play Requirements in Windows 2000 Professional

Note

Windows 2000 Professional supports Plug and Play for monitors only if the monitor, the display adapter, and the display driver are Plug and Play; otherwise, the monitor is detected as Default Monitor. For more information about Plug and Play device detection, see Setup and Startup in this book.