Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and an installation control method and particularly relates to a plug and play technique for setting an operation environment of a computer peripheral apparatus.
Description of the Related Art
A technique called plug and play in which a peripheral device becomes usable by an appropriate driver being automatically installed to a computer by simply connecting the peripheral device to the computer. Meanwhile, printers which support a plurality of PDLs (Page Description Languages) exist. In these printers, a plug and play ID (PnP ID) for each corresponding PDL is used to cause plug and play to be implemented in the computer, and printer drivers for all PDLs that are supported can be installed on the computer. However, for a user who can only use a specific PDL, a printer driver for an unused PDL is not necessary. For this reason, a technique in which it is possible for a user on a printer to be allowed to select what PDL plug and play is caused to occur is known, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-097156.
Also, in recent years, there exist printer drivers having a different architectures operating on a same OS such as a V3 printer driver, a V4 printer driver, and the like in a Windows (registered trademark) OS (Operating System). In a method described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-097156, there are printers in which users are allowed to select a PnP ID including which architecture printer driver is used since appearance or usage method differ for printer drivers of different architectures.
However, it can be considered that in the future that OSes will cease to support printer drivers of old architectures. In the method described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-097156, a problem arises in that when a PnP ID for a printer driver of an unsupported, old architecture is set for a printer, that printer driver will cease to be installable by plug and play in a future OS. While a plug and play install becomes possible by a user changing a PnP ID to a PnP ID for a printer driver of a new architecture, this is cumbersome. Note, the printer is only an example of a peripheral apparatus, and the same is true for other peripheral apparatuses.