Plug And Play

Technological advances have swept our society into the twenty-first century. Many accessories have become easily compatible to take personal PC s to new heights. Windows 95 was the first operating system to offer the feature of plug and play. Adding new hardware to your computer is easier than ever because it is set up to communicate by means of an I/O address, interrupt request, and a direct memory access channel. By powering on your system, your computer recognizes immediately new devices looking to be installed or used.

In the past, in order to have the same method that computers carry now, you would have to purchase a compatible piece of hardware, set the hardware jumpers, physically install the card, install configuration software, reboot your computer hoping everything is in working order. Now in present times, available to you is full compatibility and support for legacy hardware, support for mobile computing including hot-docking and hot-plugging of plug and play devices, automated configuration and installation of plug and play peripherals, centralized hardware configuration information in the windows 95 registry, and lastly reduced user support.

One of the most frustrating areas of operating a computer is installing hardware and or configuration of devices. Accessories such as joysticks, CD recorders, scanners, digital cameras, printers, speaker systems, and other components are the most common features people adapt to their systems. However, enabling these devices would take a significant amount of time and intelligence in order to have them operating to their full capabilities. Proper commands and certain sequences of changing system properties is required, yet with plug and play none of these problems are encountered.

Whether your desires are to joystick your way through a three dimensional helicopter game, or use a digital camera to record real live action, plug and play is what makes it easy to operate. It leaves a wide range of opportunities yet to come. Easy accessability is what helps people to become computer friendly, and motivates them to explore and learn more details within their home systems.

Opinion

One might say many people in our world today reject computers, because of inexperience some actually fear new ideas and ways of doing things. To those who suffer from this fear plug and play is one of the features designed for computer illiterate. In fact it is simpler than using some house hold appliances. At home you plug something in and turn in on. On your PC, you just plug it in, the computer does the rest for you. This shows how those with patience and willing to at least try, can succeed with any type of computer system.