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With the emergence of Plug and Play (PnP), a revolutionary design
philosophy and a new PC architecture specification finalized recently,
the PC, hardware cards, drivers and the operating system can now
work together without such “user intervention”.
You no longer need to change any hardware settings on your card
before it can work properly in a PC. Instead, a PnP BIOS or software
would find out the types of resources each card needs and allocate the
resources accordingly.
Generally, a PnP card requires one of the following to work:
❑
PnP System BIOS
❑
PnP Operating System
❑
PnP Configuration Drivers and Utilities
The PnP BIOS specification went through several revisions.
The version 1.0a specification was finalized in May 1994, with
further clarifications documented in October 1994. As a result,
older PnP systems shipped are not fully compliant with this
specification. So, there are some compatibility problems. For
more details, please read the section “PnP in DOS/Windows
3.1x” on page 14.
PnP System BIOS
The PnP system BIOS is the lowest level of your PnP system. Its main
functions are to provide information on the resource settings of your
system devices and to configure PnP cards.
Some PnP system BIOS configure PnP cards automatically. Other
BIOS give you an option in their setup utilities to disable their PnP
configuration capability. Please refer to your system manual for more
details.
PnP Operating System
A PnP operating system provides a fully PnP user environment. It can
support PnP cards on its own, with or without a PnP system BIOS. Its
main functions are to determine which resources have been reserved
by the legacy and PnP cards in your system, and then dynamically
allocate free resources to newly added PnP cards.
This manual downloaded from http://www.manualowl.com
