Tuesday, February 22, 2005
HARDWARE :: Where's The Plug N Play?
It was years ago, back in the heady days just prior to the release of Windows 95 when the term "Plug and Play" started to become the hottest buzzphrase. Ah wonderful Plug and Play, that most venerable of technologies that would allow a piece of hardware in a PC to be installed with little fuss and muss, eliminating the need for endless nights of driver and IRQ configuration. (Remember good old COM port 4 for modems?) Ostensibly, Plug and Play would kill the endless configuration frustration, and let users forget all about needing to keep driver floppies and CDs handy in case of an emergency reformat job, which was admittedly necessary a little more often than most of us would like.
The problem is that, aside from devices like the reliable Creative Labs Soundblaster cards, true Plug and Play never really materialized. With the SB cards, Windows would recognize the card all on its own, and trigger a tiny program embedded on the card that caused it to configure ITSELF as the system booted up. To me, THAT was what Plug and Play was all about. Today, I think we've all grown a little tolerant of the fact that things never developed the way they were promised, with a very few happy exceptions. Look around at some of the hardware you've likely installed in your system, and look back on what it took to get the device working. If you have Windows XP Home/Pro, chances are pretty good that even though whatever you installed started working right away, you still had to install something from a CD to use it to its fullest capability.
What I'd like to know is, in this day and age, when memory is dirt-freaking-cheap, and technology for permanent hard storage is reaching its maturity, why are the initial FULL set of drivers not installed right on the cards and devices themselves? Why is it I can install a video card and get a so-so display, but to drive that sucker the way I bought it to do, I still have to install the drivers from the CD? Those same video drivers, by the way, are by and large provided as a one-size-fits-all solution by the two major video card manufacturers, NVidia and ATI. Download one 30 megabyte file, get drivers for every card they make, all in one file, and the setup program determines which one you need. 30 megs? How much space would be taken by just the drivers you need? About 3-5 megs. That couldn't be stored and automatically run on first boot, right from the card? Right. In the era of 256MB video cards? Right.
Why didn't Plug and Play ever evolve into what it was promised to be in the first place? Even Creative Labs has fallen off of their previous designs, and their higher-end Audigy cards now require that bane of every user's existence to even get running full-tilt: the driver CD. Of course, I'm not saying anything about extra games and applications that manufacturers are bundling with their devices. I understand that. I just don't understand the need to install stuff after I installed stuff, if you get my drift.
In my main machine, I have two video cards, two sound cards, a combo USB2/Firewire/Ethernet card, and some various sundry integrated devices on the motherboard. Those components alone (whick, ok, make up just about the whole darned system), require me to keep track of no less than 5 CDs. That's not even including some of the application CDs, which in some cases are needed as well. For example, the CD/DVD burning software for my DVDR/W burner. Windows will use it as a regular CD any day of the week, all by itself, but try to burn a DVD? No way Jose'. Not without that extra application you don't. But, like I said, my gripe isn't about the application CDs. It's those freaking drivers.
I can hear most of you already. "You could just go online and download the latest ones anyway, you clown," you're saying, and you're right. Unless I don't have an internet connection handy at the time, that is. It's happened to me a couple of times, and many people don't have the time to wait for all those biggie driver files to download over their dialup AOL connections. The simple fact of the matter is that while Plug and Play has been realized to a very small degree, it is still nowhere near the original vision as put forth by Microsoft, back in those heady days just prior to the release of Windows 95. Now with Plug and Pray goodness!
Deadweasel writes articles on the backs of laden oxen in order to proofread more better.
The problem is that, aside from devices like the reliable Creative Labs Soundblaster cards, true Plug and Play never really materialized. With the SB cards, Windows would recognize the card all on its own, and trigger a tiny program embedded on the card that caused it to configure ITSELF as the system booted up. To me, THAT was what Plug and Play was all about. Today, I think we've all grown a little tolerant of the fact that things never developed the way they were promised, with a very few happy exceptions. Look around at some of the hardware you've likely installed in your system, and look back on what it took to get the device working. If you have Windows XP Home/Pro, chances are pretty good that even though whatever you installed started working right away, you still had to install something from a CD to use it to its fullest capability.
What I'd like to know is, in this day and age, when memory is dirt-freaking-cheap, and technology for permanent hard storage is reaching its maturity, why are the initial FULL set of drivers not installed right on the cards and devices themselves? Why is it I can install a video card and get a so-so display, but to drive that sucker the way I bought it to do, I still have to install the drivers from the CD? Those same video drivers, by the way, are by and large provided as a one-size-fits-all solution by the two major video card manufacturers, NVidia and ATI. Download one 30 megabyte file, get drivers for every card they make, all in one file, and the setup program determines which one you need. 30 megs? How much space would be taken by just the drivers you need? About 3-5 megs. That couldn't be stored and automatically run on first boot, right from the card? Right. In the era of 256MB video cards? Right.
Why didn't Plug and Play ever evolve into what it was promised to be in the first place? Even Creative Labs has fallen off of their previous designs, and their higher-end Audigy cards now require that bane of every user's existence to even get running full-tilt: the driver CD. Of course, I'm not saying anything about extra games and applications that manufacturers are bundling with their devices. I understand that. I just don't understand the need to install stuff after I installed stuff, if you get my drift.
In my main machine, I have two video cards, two sound cards, a combo USB2/Firewire/Ethernet card, and some various sundry integrated devices on the motherboard. Those components alone (whick, ok, make up just about the whole darned system), require me to keep track of no less than 5 CDs. That's not even including some of the application CDs, which in some cases are needed as well. For example, the CD/DVD burning software for my DVDR/W burner. Windows will use it as a regular CD any day of the week, all by itself, but try to burn a DVD? No way Jose'. Not without that extra application you don't. But, like I said, my gripe isn't about the application CDs. It's those freaking drivers.
I can hear most of you already. "You could just go online and download the latest ones anyway, you clown," you're saying, and you're right. Unless I don't have an internet connection handy at the time, that is. It's happened to me a couple of times, and many people don't have the time to wait for all those biggie driver files to download over their dialup AOL connections. The simple fact of the matter is that while Plug and Play has been realized to a very small degree, it is still nowhere near the original vision as put forth by Microsoft, back in those heady days just prior to the release of Windows 95. Now with Plug and Pray goodness!
Deadweasel writes articles on the backs of laden oxen in order to proofread more better.
