Plug and Play

Have you ever asked yourself why you can use your newly connected devices directly these days?

Plug and Play (PnP) is a service introduced with Windows 95. It allows you to hot-plug PnP compatible devices.

The operating system will

  1. Detect the device
  2. Configure the device
  3. Load the device driver 1

1 First it will try to find a matching one in the internal library, then it will try to get it from the internet.

There is also Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) which does a similar thing but on network, instead of device scope.