Windows 98 comes with an extensive library of Plug-and-Play drivers, so there should be relatively few problems with oddball hardware installations. However, this does not mean that Windows 98 will automatically recognize all peripherals and add-in cards. The situation has improved, but it is still far from perfect. The opprobrious revision “Plug-and-Pray” is not likely to vanish from the common vocabulary in the near future.
NOTE
Most programmers can probably simply ignore Plug and Play as not immediately relevant to their current applications. However, there are valid reasons to suspect that Plug and Play will become important to the application developer in the not-too-distant future. In Chapter 18, we’ll take a look at Plug-and-Play handling in Windows applications.