plug and play (or plug and pray as it's known in Redmond)
Ain't just Redmond where it's known as plug and pray. I'm not sure if that particular paraphrase is a Microsoft "innovation" or not, but being a non-believer at this point, I've been known to substitute an oath or two after the plug part.
To be fair, though, when PnP works, it does seem pretty cool. I've swapped system disks and had the whole OS come up on a different computer after reconfiguring a ton of low level stuff, all automatically. On the other hand, I don't think I've ever installed Windows without PnP making a mess out of the sound card. It always insists on installing some stupid Sound Blaster driver that doesn't work. I think the drill is delete all the junk, reboot, install new drivers, reboot, maybe it works, maybe you have to take out the card and delete everything again.
My worst experience, though, was setting up a Lucent V.90 PCI modem. I think my mistake was installing Windows with the card in place, or something, I still don't understand. Eventually, after many tries at deleting and reinstalling the non-working stuff from the device manager, with reboots after each step, I took out the card, removed all the driver files I could find manually, reinstalled the card, rebooted, the "new hardware" dialogue finally came up, and it installed & worked fine. Very odd.
I wish PnP would just give up and say "install manually", instead of making a mess of things. Or maybe it's all beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. Do you have any idea if there's an underlying problem there, or just a shaky specification and implementation?
Cheers, Dan. |
