Introduction


Hardware installation, configuration, and support are tasks that many administrators take for granted. Perhaps the administrators have help desk personnel or junior administrators whose function it is to worry about such low-level issues. But what do you do if you don't have the luxury of having an entire group or department that manages your hardware? You then learn the value of knowing how Windows 2000 deals with hardware. Even if another group handles these issues for you, you still must have a firm grasp on hardware and how it interacts with Windows 2000. Most important, you need to be able to make all of your installed hardware interact properly, not only with other installed hardware, but also with Windows 2000. Many operating system problems that users experience start with the users themselves or the hardware that they are using. Knowing how to deal with hardware installation and configuration will help keep your users happy and your boss even happier . This chapter introduces you to the nuances of verifying, installing, and configuring hardware for your clients .

In the dark days of DOS and Windows 3.11, installing new hardware in a machine could actually turn out to be a major event. Plug and Play was just a dream on an engineer's scratch pad and getting sound technical support from most vendors was a rarity at best. The Microsoft Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) did not exist and thus you just had to hope more often than not that your new hardware would work properly when matched up with your old hardware and your operating system. Of course, there were always problems with custom applications that required specific hardwarebut you get the point. When you got lucky, you were a godsend in your organization; when you were unlucky, you spent countless hours trying to figure out what went wrong. Oh the joy of it all.

Fortunately for us, these days have all but passed. In Windows 2000, with Plug and Play hardware, the installation and configuration of hardware devices has been simplified and improved substantially over all previous versions of Windows. The process for installing and configuring hardware has three basic steps:

  • Set driver signing restrictions.

  • Select the hardware to be installed and verify its compatibility.

  • Install and configure the selected hardware.

There is, of course, more to this cycle than what is outlined here. These three steps are the core parts of managing hardware in Windows 2000. You may still find yourself facing the need to support legacy hardware devices that are not Plug and Play compliant, but Windows 2000 makes this an easy task compared to previous versions of Windows. We look at each of these items in greater detail in the following sections, plus a few other items of interest in the area of hardware installation and management.



MCSE Windows 2000 Server Exam Cram2 (Exam 70-215)
MCSE Windows 2000 Server Exam Cram 2 (Exam Cram 70-215)
ISBN: 0789728737
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 155

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