DevicesConcepts

DevicesConcepts

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This topic covers managing hardware devices and device drivers, hardware profiles, and energy-saving options. Topics like how to configure display or mouse settings aren't coveredsee Windows XP in a Nutshell (O'Reilly) for more information on basic stuff like that.

WS2003 supports a much wider range of hardware devices than the earlier NT Server operating system, including support for both Plug and Play (PnP) and legacy devices. When you install legacy devices on your system, you may have to manually specify resource settings like IRQ and I/O port settings. When you install PnP devices, Windows automatically assigns resources to the device. Should two devices end up with conflicting (overlapping) resource settings, one or both of the devices may fail to work. Using the tools described in this topic, you can troubleshoot such device conflictsprovided you also have a good understanding of PC hardware (see PC Hardware in a Nutshell by Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson from O'Reilly if you don't!).

Device Drivers

Device drivers are software components that enable hardware devices to work and communicate with the operating system. Using Device Manager you can update (install) new drivers and uninstall existing ones. If problems arise after updating drivers, you can also roll back to a previous version of the driver. Driver rollback is possible because of the new driver versioning feature of WS2003. You can also roll back drivers by selecting the Last Known Good Configuration option in the Advanced Menu Options, though Device Manager provides more granularity in performing this task.

To protect device drivers included with WS2003 against corruption or tampering, Microsoft digitally signs them to assure that the file has not been altered or overwritten. You can configure Windows to do one of three things when it finds a device driver that isn't digitally signed:

• Display a warning (default)

• Ignore the issue and install the driver

• Prevent the driver from being installed

Hardware Profiles

Hardware profiles specify which devices are enabled or disabled when your computer starts up. Hardware profiles were often used for laptop computers running NT, on which you could define one profile for mobile use and another for docked use. With PnP support for Windows Server, creating separate hardware profiles is usually unnecessary since a PnP-compliant laptop can automatically detect whether it is docked and enable or disable devices accordingly .

Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)

The HCL lists the hardware platforms and devices supported by WS2003 and can be found at www.microsoft.com/hwtest/hcl/.

Hardware Enhancements in WS2003

Other enhancements to hardware support in WS2003 include:

DualView

Display adapters supporting DualView have two video interfaces that allow you to connect two monitors to one adapter and display different output on each monitor. This feature is an extension to the multimonitor support of W2K that previously required two video adapters to do the same thing.

Headless server

The new Emergency Management Services (EMS) lets you install and manage a WS2003 machine remotely from the command line when no keyboard, mouse, display adapter, or monitor is connected to the server. Administrators can also use EMS to manage servers when Windows is not functioning, such as during the boot process or when a stop screen occurs. This feature is supported by only the latest hardware, and it would typically be used to manage rack-mounted servers in a data center. See bootcfg in Chapter 5 for more information.

Hot add memory

On supporting hardware platforms, you can now add RAM without rebooting your system.

Large IDE drive

OEM hardware that supports 48-bit block addressing for ATAPI allows you to use IDE drives larger than 137 GB. Support for new UDMA transfer modes is also included.