ACPI is a good idea in theory but it's been implemented by committee and the standard is huge and extremely convoluted. I just think that using a big binary interpreter to run code in the BIOS in an attempt to achieve portability is a bad way of doing it. I will probably have to either change my mind about it or put up with the idea in the future now the option to disable ACPI has been removed from new BIOS's. How good is the support for ACPI these days? I haven't tried to run it since the early days.

It's just that anytime anybody comes up with a big unified model to handle hardware, somebody else comes along with something that doesn't fit into the model and you need to add a hack.

Ideal world for me would be that everybody at least tried to follow a sane standard and that they published their APIs. Chances of this happening are minimal though Anybody know people at 3Com responsible for writing drivers for their winmodems? I want to use my built-in 56k modem in Linux!

PnP under Linux is a joy to use. PnP under Windows is definately a different experience. I want to be able to specify exactly what the hardware should set itself to. The computer shouldn't always think it knows more than the user

I didn't know that Microsoft recommends setting the PnP OS option in the BIOS to be off. I've always had to set it to off because the USB host controller wouldn't be initialised properly for Linux. In my old VAIO you couldn't even turn it off at all.

Well... There IS an quick way to factor large prime numbers... You just need to make a large quantum computer. They've only done it with a small number of qubits at the moment so your data is safe still for a few years

I'm seriously on a big rant at the moment so I apologise if I come over as being argumentative or plain irritating

- Trevor