My personal experience borders on the disaster side. When
I decided to upgrade my periperals. 28,800 Modem, Sound Card,
Scanner I ran into some real pains in getting both Linux and
Win95 working on the same machine. I have both SCSI and IDE
drives in my system as well as ethernet. I ended up getting cards
that had jumper options that allowed me to overide plug and play if I
needed to. I think the problem is that the concept is not totally
debugged and implemented. It may work fine on a totally plug & play
system, but do you want to make your cards success dependent on
every other card in the target system. I hope you leave yourself
an out that allows a power user to manually overide plug and play.
It is much harder to get a card to do what your system requires
when the card decides it is smarter than you. That is my main problem
with plug and play. It makes you fight a slightly smart system
who thinks it is smarter than the user.
Plug and Play is nice if the automatic answers work. If not
they are a disaster.
Hubert Bahr
PS. I have 20 years experience of design and use of Micro's so it
isn't newbie problems but the Power User who tries to fix the
Newbie problems that feel plug and play are disasters.