Re: SEUL: hardware detection

[William T Wilson <fluffy@dunadan.com>]

On Sun, 18 Jan 1998, Rick Jones wrote:

> Windoze 3.x was aware of.  Anything beyond that will only be in the
> registry.  Don't ask what the bounderies are, I don't know.  I fairly

Hmm.  The one I'm thinking of is network cards, which along with video
boards are the things in PC's most nonstandard and most unlikely for the
user to not have a clue about.

> positive that monitors aren't covered in the ini files, since win
> previous to 95 didn't give a rat's ass what monitor you used.  So it's

Neither does Win95, really, except to know what resolution it can use and
whether it has a power-saver mode.  Win31 made you figure it all out
yourself. 

> PCI is not always identified.  At least not by Windoze.  I had to

It is, it's just that Windows has the same problem as Linux.  Sometimes
your devices are newer than the version of the OS, so it doesn't know what
to do about it.

> install a new inf file for it to call my card anything but a generic
> Trident or TVGA (ISA cards).  With the inf file even ISA cards are read

The inf file has a map of vendor/model ID's to device information.

> properly since they store their ROM at memorey address C000 which has

Hm, I know on the apple // all cards had to identify themselves at $C000.
I don't think this is the way with ISA cards, however.  Otherwise why are
they so hard to detect?  :)

> There is a new version of FIPS that handles FAT32.  I think it's FIPS2

Even better.

> or something like that.  Shouldn't be hard to find.  As far as defrag. 
> Just run the version sitting on the windoze partition.  If needed copy

I believe win95 defrag is a graphics application, and it won't run in text
mode?

All these Win95 applications is making me a little nervous.  The more
Win95 applications involved, the more complicated it is for the user to
set things up.  I know Win3.1 had a scripting tool, but I think Win95 has
lost this ability...