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If You're Into PC Hardware, This Is the Chapter Where You'll Have a Lot of Fun, And chapter 1 INSTALLING HARDWARE f you’re into PC hardware, this is the chapter where you’ll have a lot of fun, and pos- Isibly learn something. PC hardware has dramatically improved over the past five years. PCs offer better speed, better prices, better compatibility, and incredibly better hardware quality than ever. Some strange and potentially crippling holdovers persist from the very first days of the PC platform, the most notable of which is interrupts. Interrupts are discussed in much more detail below. Despite some nagging problems, PCs are unquestionably faster and cheaper. This chapter discusses how you can get more out of your Windows 98 system. A huge commodity parts market flourishes around the PC platform. Every comput- er store in your area sells add-on parts for your machine—video cards, sound cards, net- work cards, new hard disks, and so on. Buying new parts is a great way to extend the life of your machine. The process can get complicated. This chapter’s main mission is to help you understand and avoid the many gotchas involved in upgrading and general- ly working with your PC’s hardware. Here’s the absolute, paramount fact of this whole chapter: N Windows 98 computers rely on a specific PC feature called hardware interrupts (called IRQs, for short). N Every PC computer built in the past ten years—Windows PCs, MS-DOS PCs, you name it—uses 16 hard-wired interrupt lines that are built into the computer’s hard- ware. (The original IBM PC and XT machines had just 8 interrupts.) 1 2 CHAPTER 1 • INSTALLING HARDWARE All the individual devices in your PC, such as the keyboard, serial ports, modem, video card, networking card, printer port, sound card, game/joystick port, and disk con- troller, each occupy one of those 16 precious interrupts. Because of this, PCs offer only so much room for peripheral devices on your computer, no matter how new or how fast it is. When you add all the hardware features you’re likely to want on a new system, the odds are that you’ll only have one or two interrupts left—if you have any left. This is an inescapable fact of life for PC-compatible computers using Intel microprocessors (or Intel-compatibles). To understand just how complicated it can be to manage PC hardware, here’s a brief list of the key devices that are installed in the author’s test Windows 98 system, includ- ing two video cards, and their respective interrupt (IRQ) settings: Rich Grace’s Pentium-MMX PC Parts Interrupt (IRQ) Occupied System timer 00 Computer keyboard 01 Interrupt controller 02 Serial port 2 03 Serial ports 1 and 3 (internal modem) 04 Matrox Millennium II video card 05 Floppy disk controller 06 Available 07 System CMOS/real time clock 08 Sound Blaster sound card 09 Matrox Millennium PCI video card 10 PCI Fast Ethernet DEC 21140 network 11 adapter Computer mouse 12 Math coprocessor 13 Primary EIDE disk controller 14 Secondary EIDE disk controller 15 In this computer, which is a fairly normal setup (except for the two video cards), just one interrupt, 7, is available for a new device to use. Yep, even if you have a screaming 600 MHz Pentium III machine, with tons of RAM and disk space, you’re still stuck with just 16 interrupts. If they’re all used up in your com- puter, which happens frequently (considering all the gadgets that are out there, and how so many PC motherboards helpfully build in a sound card and joystick port), you will not be able to install a second video card unless you remove something first. That other device is CHAPTER 1 • INSTALLING HARDWARE 3 apt to be something you really need. To this day, interrupts are a true PC architecture bot- tleneck, and they can cause big problems for users of even the newest PCs. Help is at hand. INTRODUCING THE DEVICE MANAGER Here’s one Windows 98 feature in which Microsoft did a very good job. The Device Manager is a highly useful reporting tool on the status of your computer’s hardware. Combined with the new System Information application, the Device Manager provides accurate, understandable information on exactly how every device in your system is configured—including the all-important interrupts and memory segments used for hardware addressing by the system. The Manager enables changing and tweaking set- tings based on predefined configurations and even allows you to create your own. The Device Manager is a real blessing for knowledgeable PC owners because it gives you a fighting chance to get that conflicting sound card or SCSI disk controller working without jumping through hoops or ripping the recalcitrant card out of your machine in frustration. Veteran PC owners know what this means. Beyond this, there has never been a third-party software package that does a more capable job of report- ing accurately on PC hardware than the Device Manager. It even allows you to print a complete (and accurate) summary of your computer’s configuration! To locate the Device Manager, follow these steps: 1 Open the Control Panel. 2 Double-click the System icon. The System Properties window appears. 3 Click the Device Manager tab. The Device Manager appears as shown in Figure 1-1. It is a list of all the installed hardware components in your computer. A plus sign (+) next to a listing indicates sublistings, which show specific devices in your computer by name. If there is a yellow sign with an exclamation mark inside it next to any device, this is the Device Manager’s way of telling you there is a problem with that device. The device may not be configured properly, or not it may not be attached. 4 Click any plus sign or double-click a listing in the Device Manager (Figure 1-1). The list opens up to display individual devices in your computer, as shown in Figure 1-2. 5 Select any listing. 6 Click the Properties button. A Properties window appears for the selected device, as shown in Figure 1-3. This takes you another level deeper into the Manager, to the individual device level. Typically, you’ll find three tabs in the multitabbed Properties window, depending on the type of device you’re viewing: 4 CHAPTER 1 • INSTALLING HARDWARE Step3 Step4 Figure 1-1 Exploring the device tree in Device Manager. Figure 1-2 Selecting an object to view its Properties. Step5 Step6 CHAPTER 1 • INSTALLING HARDWARE 5 Figure 1-3 Checking Properties for a specific device. N General—The immediate assessment of the state of your hardware device. It tells you immediately if the device is working or not and, if it isn’t, offers at least some explanation why. Two important checkboxes appear here: Disable in this hardware profile and Exists in all hardware profiles. N Driver—Shows the version of the software driver used to enable the device in the computer. Two buttons are provided: Driver File Details and Update Driver. Driver File Details simply provides a list of the specific file making up the device’s driver package. Update Driver is an important button that allows you to install new drivers as they become available. N Resources—A vital resource for anyone needing to troubleshoot and quickly repair their PC. Allows you (sometimes) to change the interrupts and I/O ports for any device in your system. An I/O port is a small segment of your computer’s memory that is set aside for its exclusive use. It’s quite possible for devices in your system to have conflicts in I/O ports as well as interrupts. 6 CHAPTER 1 • INSTALLING HARDWARE The Resources tab allows you to physically change memory I/O ports, DMA ports, and interrupts for selected devices in your computer. In many cases, when a device is working properly, the system will not allow you to change the settings at all. In other cases, it will, depending on the type of device you’re dealing with. Just because a yellow warning sign is next to a device in the Device Manager does- n’t necessarily mean something is wrong with your system. It depends on the device. For example, if you have a SCSI-based system, IDE controllers will still show up in the Device Manager but will be tagged with the yellow icon to indicate a problem talking to devices on those controllers (there are no devices to talk to!). However, a yellow warning icon next to sound cards, network cards, or other devices that should be work- ing tends to mean that either the device is not functioning properly or the configuration information is incorrect. Occasionally, a device driver gets corrupted or the wrong device driver gets loaded, and this prevents the system from talking to the device prop- erly, hence another yellow icon. How do you fix a yellow-iconed item? The most common problem is a conflict with the IRQ and memory address assigned to the device, even if it is Plug-and-Play. The following steps can help you troubleshoot nonworking plug-in card and many devices: 1 Check the other devices on the system for the same settings and decide which should be changed. Some devices are more tolerant of changed IRQs and memo- ry addresses, while some will only work on a very small number of settings. 2 If the nonworking card is a Plug-and-Play unit, shut down the system, remove the device, and restart your machine. After the machine is up and running, make sure everything in the Device Manager is correct.
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