Plug and Play OS option in bios?????

S

Sipster

Gawd
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Mar 19, 2004
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I've heard so many conflicting stories about what to set this setting at. I have a Nforce4 Ultra mobo using windows xp.

Should this option be set to on or off or does it even matter anymore???

Thanks in advance!
 
My own understanding on this option is that if you have a OS without Plug-n-Play support, set this to no. Most recent OS is Plug-n-Play so leaving this to Yes would be good.

I'm also curious if setting it to no on a pnp OS would help or not...
 
i think this only males a difference if you are running win 3.1 or early versions of win95. i havent noticed it on recent bios's.
 
I have yet to see a BIOS where this option wasn't included, although sometimes you have to dig a little to find it. As I understand it, this option determines whether the BIOS or Windows assigns IRQ's to the cards and other hardware devices in your system. With Win98 and below, letting Windows do it usually resulted in problems. With Windows XP, it seems to work fine for most setups. However, if you experience any problems with devices being recognized by Device Manager, I would try changing the setting from Yes to No and thus forcing the BIOS to manage IRQ's. This also usually requires changing the IRQ assignment option from auto to manual, which sounds like you have to choose the IRQs yourself but actually just tells the BIOS to do it for you, with the option of changing them yourself but you almost never need to touch them at that point.


The advantage of letting the BIOS do it is that the assignments are all taken care of before Windows even loads, eliminating problems with the timing of loading device drivers etc. The advantage of letting Windows do it is that it can perform fancier tricks in assigning multiple devices to an IRQ, necessary in modern systems with a vast array of hardware devices to juggle.

IRQ management is one of those nasty little legacy pieces that still hide deep inside the Wintel architecture from the oldest days of the IBM PC, like paged memory, the 640K memory barrier, the A20 gate, etc. etc. Some of them have been so thoroughly worked around that they might as well no longer exist as far as the end user is concerned, but the fact that they are still there under all the layers of spackle just makes me shake my head and laugh sadly.

That was the whole idea behind the Itanium architecture--Intel wanted to finally kill the ancient beast that they had created and start over fresh. Then little AMD came along and signed a devil's bargain with the ancient beast by coming up with a very cheap and effective way to add 64-bit processing to the old architecture. Intel had to follow suit, the Itanium is dying a slow death in the marketplace because of its high cost and lack of backward compatibility, and X86 gets the last laugh as the Monster That Wouldn't Die... *cackle cackle cackle*
 
Commander Suzdal said:
I have yet to see a BIOS where this option wasn't included, although sometimes you have to dig a little to find it. As I understand it, this option determines whether the BIOS or Windows assigns IRQ's to the cards and other hardware devices in your system. With Win98 and below, letting Windows do it usually resulted in problems. With Windows XP, it seems to work fine for most setups. However, if you experience any problems with devices being recognized by Device Manager, I would try changing the setting from Yes to No and thus forcing the BIOS to manage IRQ's. This also usually requires changing the IRQ assignment option from auto to manual, which sounds like you have to choose the IRQs yourself but actually just tells the BIOS to do it for you, with the option of changing them yourself but you almost never need to touch them at that point.


The advantage of letting the BIOS do it is that the assignments are all taken care of before Windows even loads, eliminating problems with the timing of loading device drivers etc. The advantage of letting Windows do it is that it can perform fancier tricks in assigning multiple devices to an IRQ, necessary in modern systems with a vast array of hardware devices to juggle.

IRQ management is one of those nasty little legacy pieces that still hide deep inside the Wintel architecture from the oldest days of the IBM PC, like paged memory, the 640K memory barrier, the A20 gate, etc. etc. Some of them have been so thoroughly worked around that they might as well no longer exist as far as the end user is concerned, but the fact that they are still there under all the layers of spackle just makes me shake my head and laugh sadly.

That was the whole idea behind the Itanium architecture--Intel wanted to finally kill the ancient beast that they had created and start over fresh. Then little AMD came along and signed a devil's bargain with the ancient beast by coming up with a very cheap and effective way to add 64-bit processing to the old architecture. Intel had to follow suit, the Itanium is dying a slow death in the marketplace because of its high cost and lack of backward compatibility, and X86 gets the last laugh as the Monster That Wouldn't Die... *cackle cackle cackle*
Click to expand...

Nice summary :).
 
Thanks for the info. I am going to reload my system this weekend I and guess I will change that setting to enabled. I've been having problems with a lot of BSOD's lately so I am looking for anything that might help!
 
If you're getting BSOD's, take a look at the error message and google it. I doubt that it's IRQ conflict.

I've always been taught PnP OS is always no. The reason stated above covers it in detail, but basically Windows has enough to do and anything that you can offload is helpful.

If you have IRQ/Driver conflicts you'd know from looking in the device manager or devices failing to start such as modems, any other PCI cards, USB devices, even hard drives if you really mess it up.
 
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