Maintaining Physical and Logical Devices
Windows uses plug and play technology to automatically install the appropriate drivers for hardware. This usually works, but in some cases, the hardware is either not detected or an appropriate driver is not found. To manually install the hardware use the add hardware wizard and supply the appropriate driver from the manufacturer’s disk or from the manufacturer’s web site. To view all installed devices on the computer, open device manager in the computer management snap in. Devices can be viewed by type on by connection, and hidden devices can also be shown. The device manager can be used to troubleshoot devices, install drivers, update drivers, roll back drivers and disable or enable devices.
To keep your computer up to date with the latest patches and fixes from microsoft , enable automatic updates. Windows update was introduced in the previous versions of windows, but in windows xp , the ability to schedule updates has been added. Also remember to configure driver signing on your system to prevent users from installing unsigned drivers. Driver signing can be set to warn the user of potential hazards, block the user from installing unsigned driver or ignore any unsigned driver and install it anyway.
There are two types of disks -basic and dynamic. Dynamic disks allows you to create volumes, which can span multiple physical drives and can be fault tolerant. The volume type that you can create on dynamic disks are simple volumes, spanned volumes, stripped volumes, mirrored volumes, and RAID-5 volumes. Raid-5 volumes and mirrored volumes are fault tolerant, and the data can be recovered if one drive in the volume fails.
Encryption and compression are features of the NTFS file systems, which you must know how to effectively use. Files and folders can be compressed to save disk space. It is recommended that folders be compressed , not files, and that the display colour is changed to allow for easier viewing. Compression is not supported on FAT Volumes.File and folders can also be encrypted to protect the contents; however a file cannot be encrypted.
