The material in our textbook about Plug and Play is short but merits careful and detailed reading, perhaps with some biction (ink = think). Plug and Play is discussed in additional handouts and in our textbook. These pages (handout) discuss what features of Plug and Play (PnP) are present in Windows NT 4.0 (it is coming in NT 5.0 and already in Win 95). These pages (handout) discuss what features of PnP are absent in NT 4.0. These same pages discuss how BIOS is set up on most newer PCs to let NT take care of: 1. disabling hardware 2. interrogating the PnP cards (of PnP devices, such as sound and video and CD-ROM hardware with PnP cards) 3. building a database of configuration settings 4. set up PnP to avoid conflicts 5. re-enable the hardware BIOS leaves it to the Operating System for newer PCs, because it is expecting an OS like Windows 95 (with Plug and Play support) to take care of all the PnP issues. BIOS can be modified by changing one of its settings, so it takes more responsibility and configures devices when the computer is booted up. This would be at a much earlier stage in the entire boot-up process, right? Look for a configuration option about PnP and choices: by O.S. by BIOS Change the setting to "by BIOS". So the BIOS for newer computers can automatically detect and configure some of the PnP devices in the Windows NT 4.0 personal computer, since we don't have Windows 95 and NT has very limited PnP support. When NT 5.0 comes into being, all this will be superceeded by its full-fledged Plug and Play support. That is the part of the lecture notes for today that we did not get to because of the Paint and convert nt.bmp nt.gif and the chmod 744 nt.gif and the octal to binary to file permissions stuff. What is the objective of Plug and Play technology? 1. To simplify the initial configuration of a computer. 2. To simplify adding hardware devices after initial configuration. What does Plug and Play enable (in the Windows 95 operating system)? It enables Windows 95 to automatically detect and configure the devices in the Windows 95 computer. The user is not required to know which resource settings to assign to a particular device. The user does not even usually have to know the model of the PnP device being used. The user is very happy to let Windows 95 PnP automation take care of all of this!