Chapter 25 -- Managing Devices and Drivers

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Chapter 25

A device is any piece of equipment attached to your computer—a printer, modem, monitor, or mouse, for example. A device driver is a program that enables Microsoft Windows 2000 to communicate with a particular device. Each of your system's devices requires one or more drivers.

Many, but not all, devices require one or more of four kinds of system resources: interrupt request (IRQ) lines, direct memory access (DMA) channels, input/output (I/O) ports, and memory addresses. For all of the elements of your system to operate harmoniously, someone or something—a user or the operating system—has to ensure that devices don't lay claim to the same resources (the same DMA channel, for example) at the same time. Fortunately, thanks to the Plug and Play standard, Windows 2000 is able to supervise resource assignments for most devices in use today, making resource-assignment conflicts rare.

Device Manager, shown in Figure 25-1, is a tool that lists all of your system's devices, shows the names of each of your device's drivers, identifies and helps you resolve any resource-assignment conflicts that might exist, provides access to other forms of troubleshooting, and provides access to the Update Device Driver Wizard, which you can use to install new versions of your drivers as they become available. If you're having trouble with a device, Device Manager should be the first place to turn. You'll also find Device Manager useful if you simply want to confirm successful installation of some new hardware item.

Figure 25-1. Device Manager provides detailed information about your system's devices and drivers.

To run Device Manager:

1. Open the Start menu and choose Settings, Control Panel, System.
2. Click the Hardware tab.
3. Click Device Manager.

Alternatively, right-click My Computer and choose Manage from the shortcut menu. Then click Device Manager in the console pane of Computer Management.