A+: Device Manager, a System Management Tool -2

To see more information about a specific device, double-click the device to open its properties sheet. Device properties sheets have a General tab and some combination of other tabs:

    • General— Displays device type, manufacturer, location, status, troubleshoot button, and usage. All devices.

    • Properties— Device-specific settings. Applies to multimedia devices.

    • Driver— Driver details and version information. All devices.

    • Details— Technical details about the device (added in Windows XP SP2). All devices.

    • Policies— Optimizes external drives for quick removal or performance. USB, FireWire, and eSATA drives.

    • Resources— Hardware resources such as IRQ, DMA, Memory and I/O port address. Applies to I/O devices.

,     • Volumes— Drive information such as status, type, capacity, and so on. Click Populate to retrieve information. Applies to hard disk drives.

    • Power— Power available per port. Applies to USB root hubs and generic hubs.

    • Power Management— Specifies device-specific power management settings. Applies to USB, network, keyboard, and mouse devices.

Virtually all recent systems support Plug and Play (PnP) hardware with automatic resource allocation by a combination of the PnP BIOS and Windows. However, if you need to determine the hardware resources in use in a particular system, click View and select Resources by type. For example, a typical XP system and its ACPI power management enables IRQs above 15, and sharing of PCI IRQs 17, 20, 22, and 23 by multiple devices.


Comments