Legacy Plug and Play
series of specifications and Microsoft Windows features
The term Legacy Plug and Play, also shortened to Legacy PnP, describes a series of specifications and Microsoft Windows features geared towards operating system configuration of devices, and some device IDs are assigned by UEFI Forum. The standards were primarily aimed at the IBM PC standard bus, later dubbed Industry Standard Architecture (ISA). Related specifications are also defined for the common external or specialist buses commonly attached via ISA at the time of development, including RS-232 and parallel port devices.
As a Windows feature, Plug and Play refers to operating system functionality that supports connectivity, configuration and management with native plug and play devices. Originally considered part of the same feature set as the specifications, Plug and Play in this context refers primarily to the responsibilities and interfaces associated with Windows driver development.
Plug and Play allows for detection of devices without user intervention, and occasionally for minor configuration of device resources, such as I/O ports and device memory maps. PnP is a specific set of standards, not be confused with the generic term plug and play, which describes any hardware specification that alleviates the need for user configuration of device resources.
ACPI is the successor to Legacy Plug and Play.
Overview
The Plug and Play standard requires configuration of devices to be handled by the PnP BIOS, which then provides details of resources allocations to the operating system. The process is invoked at boot time.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q60738905. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Legacy Plug and Play” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.