Plug & Play : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

go to home page P words local find full screen, hide local find menu Google search web for more information on this topic jump to foot of page translate this page with Babelfish punctuation 0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z (all) ©1997-2009 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products
Plug & Play
Assigning port addresses, IRQs and DMA channels in a way that does not conflict is a black art. Often you don’t have full documentation. Every card has a different set of possible choices, and different ways of telling it what to use. Plug & Play is a half-baked attempt to automate this process. The main problem is the legacy cards that don’t know the Plug & Play conventions. You have to manually nudge Plug & Play along. The other problem is software that expects long standing conventions to be adhered to. Plug & Play left to itself comes up with some eccentric assignments. Ironically, it can be harder to configure a system that is partly slippery-eel Plug & Play than one with none at all. Happily most Plug & Play devices allow the feature to be turned off, and let you tell the devices which IRQs, address ports and DMA channels to use. Happily Windows-95 now has tools to help in detecting conflicts. Some day, all devices, including the motherboard will be 100% Plug & Play, and the PC will finally evolve to the state the Apple Macintosh was a decade ago.
DMA
IRQ
port address
CMP homejump to top You can get the freshest copy of this page from: or possibly from your local J: drive (Java virtual drive/mindprod.com website mirror)
http://mindprod.com/bgloss/plugnplay.html J:\mindprod\bgloss\plugnplay.html
CMP logofeedback Please email your feedback for publication, errors, omissions, typos, formatting errors, ambiguities, unclear wording, broken/redirected link reports, suggestions to improve this page or comments to Roedy Green : feedback email
mindprod.com IP:[65.110.21.43]
viewYour face IP:[38.107.191.105]
You are visitor number 5,824.