Chapter Summary

Whether installing, configuring, or troubleshooting Windows XP Professional, a network administrator must understand the relationship between the operating system and various system devices. The main interface between Windows XP and storage devices, display devices, and power management in a PC is through the HAL. The HAL is selected during Windows XP setup.

The majority of the management of the hard disks, CD drives, DVD drives, tape devices, and their controllers is dealt with in Device Manager. This utility enables the basic configuration of these devices and their controllers, and the management of their drivers.

The Disk Management utility provides an interface directly with the volumes that exist on disk drives. This is also the location where you can upgrade basic disks to dynamic disks and configure volumes. Multiple disks can be configured with fault tolerance in either a mirrored volume or RAID-5 volume configuration. Volumes can be extended across multiple disks to increase the size of disk space available.

Windows XP can be configured with up to 10 monitors. The Display properties dialog is the main location for display configuration, including extending a screen across multiple displays, changing the refresh rate and resolution, or altering the color depth.

Windows XP can take advantage of power savings when the computer is ACPI-compliant. The interface to ACPI is the Power Options utility in Control Panel. This utility provides battery and UPS monitoring, plus the configuration of laptop actions and a variety of power schemes.