Section 9.5. Hardware


9.5. Hardware

A PC contains several pounds of wires, slots, cards, and chipsenough hardware to open a TruValue store. Fortunately, you don't have to worry about making all of your PC's preinstalled components work together. In theory, at least, the PC maker did that part for you. (Unless you built the machine yourself, that is; in that case, best of luck.)

But adding new gear to your computer is another story. Hard drives , cameras , printers, scanners , network adapter cards, video cards, keyboards, monitors , game controllers, palmtop synchronization cradles, and other accessories can all make life worth living for the power user . When you introduce a new piece of equipment to the PC, you must hook it up and install its driver , the software that lets a new gadget talk to the rest of the PC.

Fortunately, Microsoft has taken much of the headache out of such installation rituals by its invention of Plug and Play. The rest of this chapter guides you through using this featureand counsels you on what to do when Plug and Play doesn't work.

UP TO SPEED
Many Drivers

Windows XP comes with the driver software for thousands of different pieces of gear. It keeps many of these drivers, in compacted form, right there on your hard drive (in a file called Driver.cab). The Windows XP CD comes with hundreds of others.

All of these included drivers have been tested to work perfectly with Windows XP. Furthermore, Microsoft adds to this collection as new products appear, and sends you these new drivers via the Automatic Updates feature described on Section 11.5.3.

Many drivers that were certified for compatibility with Windows 2000 and Windows Me work with Windows XP. But if all you have for a particular gadget is Windows 98 (and earlier) driver software, you're probably out of luck.





Windows XP for Starters. The Missing Manual
Windows XP for Starters: The Missing Manual: Exactly What You Need to Get Started
ISBN: 0596101554
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 162
Authors: David Pogue

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