DevicesNotes

DevicesNotes

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Understanding some subtle points about devices can help alleviate (at least in some cases) the inevitable frustration caused by hardware that doesn't work properly due to improper configuration.

Device Manager

Exercise caution when using Device Manager: by making improper changes to your hardware resource settings, you can easily render your system inoperable. Make sure you have an understanding of computer hardware configurations before attempting to manually change these settings.

Make changes to hardware resource settings sparinglywhen you manually change a device setting, the change becomes fixed and leaves WS2003 less flexibility when assigning remaining resources to PnP devices.

Don't use Device Manager to disable a device, such as your hard drive, that is necessary to start WS2003 or you could be in trouble!

Before you try uninstalling and reinstalling a PnP device that has stopped functioning, simply try rebooting the system to see if the problem corrects itself.

Uninstalling a device doesn't remove the device drivers from your hard disk.

Add Hardware

You may need to be logged on as an Administrator to install a PnP device if user interaction is required during the installation process. You must be logged on as an Administrator to use Add/Remove Hardware to install a legacy (non-PnP) device.

If you encounter errors when installing a PnP device, check Event Viewer for more information on PnP events.

If you install a legacy device, you also manually specify the resource settings (IRQ, I/O, and so on) for the device. This means that if a resource conflict that involves the device arises afterward, WS2003 can't reconfigure the settings that you configured manually. This is a good reason for using only PnP hardware with WS2003.

Group Policy can prevent this wizard from running on a computer belonging to a certain domain.

Power Options

Additional tabs may be displayed by Power Options on certain machines. For example, laptop computers may show an Alarms tab that can be used to configure an alarm to warn you when your battery is about to run out.

On portables, you can specify one scheme for battery use and another for AC use.

Make sure that you save all your work before you enter (or allow your machine to enter) standby mode, since any data stored only in physical memory (RAM) is lost when standby occurs.

Servers should not generally be allowed to enter standby mode since they are often in demand 24 hours a day.

A command called powercfg can be used to configure power options from the command line. First introduced in XP SP1, this command is intended mainly for laptops.

System

If you specify that the Hardware Profile menu is displayed for zero seconds, the menu is not displayed and the default profile is loaded automatically. You can override this by pressing the spacebar during startup.

You can also enable or disable specific services for a given hardware profile by doing the following:

Administrative Tools Services right-click on a service Properties Log On select a hardware profile Enable or Disable

System Information

When you first have your computer up and running, use System Information to print a complete report of the hardware configuration, and file this report somewhere safe. It may be useful later on should hardware problems occur. Make sure you update this report whenever you install new hardware or reconfigure existing hardware.

See Also

Administrative Tools , Automatic Updates , bootcfg , date , driverquery , mode , net time , shutdown , systeminfo , time