the death of plug and play

In the olden days, when you plugged a device into a computer you had to manually tell the computer that it was there. Then they invented "plug and play," whereby the computer would automatically recognize the device when you plugged it in.

But more and more I am finding that the computer refuses to recognize that a device has been plugged in. Sometimes if I unplugged it and replugged it several times it would work initially, but even that doesn't work any more. The device knows it's plugged in, all right. The little "charging" icon is churning away happily. But the computer doesn't know it's there, and as far as I know there's no longer a manual mechanism to tell it.

Or, it recognizes that something is there but insists that you need to set the computer to searching for a driver for it. If you set it to doing so, it will keep on searching until Godot comes. If not, it will tell you that it can't install the hardware. And this of a device that worked fine on previous occasions.

I'd prefer to live in a science-fiction universe, one where engineering works.