Cards with driver chips?

[cmputrskillme]

Well, when my husband gets to thinking, it's just plain dangerous! :p

Hubby wants to know why when one buys a card, ie video, sound, the driver cannot be on the card in a chip somewhere on the thing so when those who know little to nothing about computers can just install the thing and have it run without problems. This way, windows can search for the driver and retrieve it from the device rather than use a CD or having to download them.

Now I know this is one of his lame brain ideas,( kinda like him thinking that if he had a couple of really big magnets, he could power our whole house???).........but wouldn't it be nice?

Your thoughts????

[efc]

I am going to take a shot at this, even though I may not be qualified to do so. The problem here is not the card. It is the OS. The OS must know how to deal with the new card when it is installed. Windows and Linux distributions contain many drivers when the OS is initially installed. When you buy that latest video card that can vacuum your carpets, and wash your dishes, the OS may not have the faintest idea of how to make it work. When that happens in XP, video will often revert to default output (480 x 640 with 16 colors).

For your idea to work, the OS would have to find the new card, retrieve the driver from that card, and then install it into the OS. An OS that could do this would probably not work with older hardware.

I am looking forward to see what others think about this.

[Reverend]

Video and sound card drivers are usually upgraded regularly so it is therefore easier and more cost effective for manufacturers to ship the drivers on a CD or via downloads rather than embed them on a chip that could possibly be redundant before you even buy the card.

Also bear in mind some driver packages are quite large.