March 18, 1996 Windows Plug and Play still holds more promise than payoff It's here and helpful, but continued lack of devices, drivers means plenty of "Plug and Pray" for IS By Emily Leinfuss P lug and play -- three magical words that promise a much better world to the IS manager. No more worrying about hardware conflicts, swapping cards in and out until a problem is solved, dealing with recalcitrant drivers, and reciting prayers that everything will work after yet another reboot. But the operative word is promise. Plug and Play, in its current form, is available with Windows 95 -- but fully functional Plug and Play is 18 to 24 months away, which is about the same amount of time that was predicted when Win95 came out nearly seven months ago. And Plug and Play for Windows NT will not be available until its Cairo release, which is due to come out sometime in 1997 or even early in 1998. Given this state of affairs, many IS shops continue to wait or waffle when it comes to choosing between Windows 95 or Windows NT. Other companies, however, have been out there plugging in and plugging away in an attempt to reap the advantages of what Plug and Play has to offer today. Here's what they've discovered. A SMOOTH RIDE -- FOR SOME. The consensus among users and analysts is that the journey to complete Plug and Play capability for Windows 95 has very little to do with Microsoft Corp. Instead, the holdup is caused by the slow adoption rate of Plug and Play by add-in board, card, and other peripheral manufacturers. When hardware manufacturers are producing Plug and Play devices, the accompanying drivers often don't work correctly. And many vendors haven't bothered yet to produce drivers for legacy equipment. Almost any device and driver out there can be used with Windows 95, but sometimes it depends on how much work you're willing to do to get them running. "The problem with Plug and Play is that you invariably run into problems with [legacy] hardware that the operating system doesn't have a clue about," says Michael Gartenberg, research director at Gartner Group Inc., in Cambridge, Mass. So the more recent the hardware, the better, he adds. The Plug and Play ride is also fairly smooth if you have a standard set of first-tier hardware. Having completed about 2,500 of 4,000 conversions from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, Daniel Kleyn, information engineer at the Plainfield, Ind.-based utility Cinergy Inc., has not experienced any major problems. Cinergy has Compaq Computer Corp. machines as standard desktops. Cinergy, the result of a recent merger between PSI Energy and Cincinnati Gas and Electric, was an early adopter of Windows 95 because it needed to interconnect the two different networks of the formerly separate companies. "The driving reason to migrate was to provide, on the desktop, an OS that could tie in to both our Ethernet and Token Ring networks," Kleyn says. The only problems he experienced were in legacy Bernoulli boxes, some Windows 95 printer drivers for Hewlett-Packard Co. printers, and "in some cases we had to go in and make switch settings on network cards," Kleyn says. He says the standardization of the desktop was the key to easy Plug and Play installation. THE RIDE GETS ROCKIER. What happens when you are not so standard is another story, and a fairly common one at that, because when Win95 was first released, there were few Plug and Play players. Today there are more than 1,000 manufacturers on Microsoft's compatibility list. Is that enough? Microsoft thinks so. "With 1,000 devices, generally OEMs and end-users have the choice to build an entirely Plug and Play system," says Mike Flora, technical evangelist at Microsoft. He suggests that users "choose wisely." But Flora also admits that it is a matter of supply. He cites the example of Creative Labs Inc., maker of the Sound Blaster card. The Milpitas, Calif.-based company is selling more Plug and Play cards, he notes. "That took awhile; they had a lot of inventory of older components," Flora says. But that doesn't mean everything works like a charm. John Cooper, manager of employee information systems at Florida Power and Light, in Juno Beach, Fla., recently had a problem trying to install Creative Labs' Sound Blaster Plug and Play kits into HP Vectra PCs. The Sound Blaster Plug and Play wouldn't play with HP's Plug and Play. "It was trial and error," Cooper says. "Eventually we had to trade them out, box them up, and send them back." He replaced the equipment with non-Plug and Play kits. "We got hit pretty good, though, and lost a few days," Cooper says. "Plug and Play is nice when it works, and when it works, it works beautifully," Cooper adds. "When it screws up, boy is it a pain." Florida Power and Light will eventually move to Windows NT, Cooper says, and will stick with Windows 95 for laptop support. Similar to his peers in many other corporations that have adopted Win95, Cooper has discovered that the OS' mobile features are easy to use and are truly Plug and Play. "The PCMCIA cards work out real well," Kleyn says. "Our users travel back and forth from Ethernet to Token Ring networking. We can just interchange the cards with no trouble." AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Sam Avera's Plug and Play experience was quite atypical. Avera is computer information systems specialist at the State of Washington Aging and Adult Services Administration. Avera's organization, in Olympia, Wash., is undergoing a conversion from Windows for Workgroups 3.11 to Windows 95. With 150 of the 600 installs completed, Avera has had more trouble with the Plug and Play-compatible hardware than with the legacy hardware. Avera says legacy Madge Networks Inc. Token Ring network cards were easier to install with Windows 95 than new Plug and Play versions. Not that it was a breeze -- but at least the old Madge cards had a discernible pattern. "You would come to a point in the install when the operating system would ask about hardware and you would just say OK [to the selected option]," Avera explains. "But in effect it would select the wrong Madge card, so you had to reselect the cards and select the right drivers." "We had that early glitch, but we figured it out," Avera says. "After that it was a breeze to do the old, non-Plug and Play installs." Avera simply put the right command set into a "push" installation that boots from a floppy disk to configure the network on Windows 95. Then he ordered 52 new Pentium PCI-bus machines and ordered 52 new Plug and Play-compatible Madge ring nodes. "It was a nightmare," Avera says. "No two cards seemed to install the same way." Microsoft acknowledges that PCI and Plug and Play are problematical at present, but says the difficulties should be solved by the end of this year. Avera called the vendor, and after five days of "pulling our hair out" was able to install the nodes. CHICKEN OR EGG? These hit-or-miss (or "Plug and Pray") experiences are at least partially tied to the hardware manufacturers' sluggish adoption of Plug and Play. But that slow adoption is in turn partially attributable to the vendors' noting that corporations haven't exactly flocked to Windows 95. And corporations have particularly rejected Win95 as the OS to run on their legacy PCs -- a fact reflected in the higher number of preloaded sales of new systems rather than sales of the OS alone, says Michael Goulde, senior consultant at Patricia Seybold Group Inc., in Boston. "Windows 95 hasn't penetrated the market as much as we thought it would," adds Kevin David, senior consultant at Akeda Computer Consultants, in Toronto. "Until a critical mass of people run it, we will not see a lot of the hardware companies rushing out to make Plug and Play-compatible hardware." Windows watchers begin to disagree, however, on how much longer companies might wait to adopt Windows 95. Goulde thinks many customers are holding back from any decision at all and are sticking with what they have, to a large degree, because of legacy hardware. "There is a fair amount of hardware that is really not ready to support Windows 95 and not worth upgrading," Goulde says. "But [companies] are not ready to replace it. It is a slow process." But Gartner Group's Gartenberg feels there's about to be an upturn in Windows 95 conversions at corporations. Driving his outlook is a belief that there is a two-year window before support and maintenance ceases for 16-bit computing. "In two years we won't have 16-bit device driver support for old machines," Gartenberg predicts. "Everyone [vendors and users] will have to get in step with Plug and Play over the next couple of years. More and more users will expect the stuff to plug and play." "Today we know it's not going to work perfectly," he concludes, "but what we get we are grateful for." Emily Leinfuss is a free-lance writer based in Sarasota, Fla. Copyright © 1996 by InfoWorld Publishing Company

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