Plug & Play : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1997-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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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

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