DAMN Seriously.... installing drivers is becoming worse than installing a whole OS

[schneiderguy]

You think 60mb is bad? HP printer drivers were around 200mb the last time I downloaded one.

 

[Gunbuster]

Yeah the current HP home product drivers and installer suck ass.

 

[Squisher]

Right now I can't even install my printer drivers for my HP printer because I made the grievous error of having the printer plugged in when I started the software. I'm sure I could unplug it and spend some time deleting any trace of it in the registry, but the wife is giving me her printer anyway, so screw it.

 

[brxndxn]

I'm so goddamn sick of all this driver shit.

HP, you suck. Your printers need <100kb of 'actual driver instruction' yet you install all sorts of bullshit that runs for 'all users.' Then, when I create a limited user, it immediately pops up an error when the automatic HP bullshit tries to run. How fucking professional.

Also.. where the hell is the 'i don't give a shit about driver updates' button? If my hardware works, I don't want to be notified and bugged to death.

All wireless cards suck. I'm so goddamn sick of wireless card software that insists on hiding all driver components so it's practically impossible to install the driver without all the crappy software. Then, when I click the 'Use Windows..' option for wireless configuration, it still goes back to 'crappy software' for the next user on the system.

Sound card drivers suck. Windows has a built-in volume control that ain't half bad.. So why create a shitty-looking application where the stuff isn't even lined up right and the icons look like Windows 3.11 icons?


I feel like everything with computers is getting sloppy in general.. It's like every programmer feels it's their job to just hack shit together and make it work for the majority of scenarios..

 

[Modelworks]

Most drivers are really tiny. Example, nvidia drivers are 70MB + but the actual driver files themselves are about 38MB. Some like printer drivers are even less, download is 90MB , actual size of drivers required for printer to work, 16MB. They put everything in them from persistent update programs to applications that are not needed like video files that describe how to change a cartridge.

My other gripe is the bloat of the download sites themselves. If I have a pc with no video drivers, and I am looking at a 800x600 screen in 16 colors, I don't want to look at your damn flash display and navigation menus to get the driver !

 

[OutHouse]

OP you are clueless. I remember back in day when you would put your job on the line when it came to updating drivers a NT server. get tasked with updating a production NT server with a driver or OS patch then come talk to me about high blood pressure.



NT Drivers sucked i cant tell you how many times ive blue screened a server just from installing a driver or update provided by MICROSOFT! god i was glad when we got rid of NT in our server rooms. that was a happy happy day.

 

[us3rnotfound]

Every driver package should be like Intel's chipset drivers.

 

[XZeroII]

Pentium 4 with Windows XP? What is this, 2004? Maybe you should just get a better printer and/or a newer computer.

 

[Arcadio]

Originally posted by: XZeroII
Pentium 4 with Windows XP? What is this, 2004? Maybe you should just get a better printer and/or a newer computer.

Not mine. A client's. My computer is old, though. I'm waiting for the new processors before building my own computer.

 

[KeypoX]

user error....lol

 

[MotionMan]

Originally posted by: Xanis

Originally posted by: Kaido
Mac ftw

Down boy, down! This is not the time or place!

Wrong forum, all around.

MotionMan

 

[JM Aggie08]

waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

 

[MotionMan]

Originally posted by: Gunbuster
Yeah all of the HP home product drivers and installer suck ass.

Fixed.

MotionMan

 

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: Fayd

Originally posted by: Rubycon
Flash memory is cheap.

For hp and others with ginormous bloatware crap what they should do is put it on flash. So when you plug in your device it mounts it as removable storage and autoplay starts the install shield wizard. No more install disks and no more 600MB downloads for their fecal drivers. Logitech should do the same thing with cordless dongles! If you don't use mouseware you can use the receiver as a flash drive.

how you gonna update drivers?

and then every device you have connected through USB has become a drive, taking a drive letter?

if you get a virus, it hides itself on one or all of these drives?

bad idea. i like my printer the way it is. well, maybe not the way it is. i wish HP would actually make stable drivers.

My Sprint wireless USB internet stick has read-only drivers built-in for Win2k/XP/Vista (also works on 7, interestingly). You just stick it in, it installs the drivers, and you're off and running with no downloads necessary.

 

[skace]

Any driver install that comes in a 60mb executable is coming with something that is more than a driver. HP does this a lot, they will label something the "PS Driver" when it's a full fucking CD of bullshit. The driver is in there though, if you dig deep enough and it never really gets big at all.

 

[Freshgeardude]

windows 7.


The main reason I was not wanting to wipe this computer was bc of all the drivers, I agree, its a pain in the fucking ass, but, windows 7 found and installed EVERY driver. I was so amazed and was very happy

 

[yowolabi]

Originally posted by: Arcadio

Originally posted by: XZeroII
Pentium 4 with Windows XP? What is this, 2004? Maybe you should just get a better printer and/or a newer computer.

Not mine. A client's. My computer is old, though. I'm waiting for the new processors before building my own computer.

I just built mine. I figured a quad-core will be more than enough for the next few years.

There's always some "new" processor right around the corner. At some point you just have bite the bullet.

 

[JulesMaximus]

Dude, just download the basic driver package...not the entire bloatware they want you to install.

 

[GeekDrew]

Originally posted by: JulesMaximus
Dude, just download the basic driver package...not the entire bloatware they want you to install.

... a lot of vendors aren't providing that for some devices.

-------------------------
/me, the A-list employed SUV-driving prick from Ohio

 

[TurtleCrusher]

OMFG are you okay?

 

[JulesMaximus]

Originally posted by: GeekDrew

Originally posted by: JulesMaximus
Dude, just download the basic driver package...not the entire bloatware they want you to install.

... a lot of vendors aren't providing that for some devices.

-------------------------
/me, the A-list employed SUV-driving prick from Ohio

I've never had that problem with HP printers.

Oh, and enjoy your job. May you never have to deal with any problems in your life. :beer:

 

[Arcadio]

Originally posted by: JulesMaximus
Dude, just download the basic driver package...not the entire bloatware they want you to install.

Did you read my post?

 

[herrjimbo]

Originally posted by: Arcadio

Originally posted by: JulesMaximus
Dude, just download the basic driver package...not the entire bloatware they want you to install.

Did you read my post?

does anyone?

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: GeekDrew

Originally posted by: JulesMaximus
Dude, just download the basic driver package...not the entire bloatware they want you to install.

... a lot of vendors aren't providing that for some devices.

-------------------------
/me, the A-list employed SUV-driving prick from Ohio

Yeah, like Logitech.
Need a quick little mouse driver? Coming right up - oh, but it's a 64MB file. And if you thought the download took a long time, wait until you run the installation program.

I think most of us can remember having a DOS boot disk which included a very functional mouse driver. Hell, I used a Supermicro motherboard back in the Pentium II days (P6SLA), and its BIOS even had a GUI, with mouse support.


I'm also sick of the driver packages that contain drivers for every single product a company offers.

 

[Slimline]

Originally posted by: Arcadio
I remember back in the day when installing drivers took literally less than 10 seconds from the moment when you clicked "install"...

Now there's this mammoth driver package you must download just for the "Basic Printer and Scanner Driver". If it's basic, why is it 60MB? Yeah, sure, Cable and DSL is very popular nowadays, but still....

OK, so downloading is done, now installing should take a minute or so, right? NOooooo... first the package must be "optimized", which takes forever. Then when this "optimization" is done, the installer "Gets ready to install", then "generate script", then a bunch of other useless steps that take forever....

OK, the installer says "connect device"... ok, connected. But why does the printer needs like 10 minutes to get ready. Several noises coming from the printer tell you that it's doing something, but why is it taking so long?

And the worst part: the installer gets stuck at 12% and does absolutely NOTHING. You check the task manager: 99% System idle. Check the drive activity led on the front of the PC: not blinking. Installer must've crashed.... So let's close it and retry..... uhhh, where's the cancel button? Fuck it, I'll just End-program it. Restart the computer and guess what: another program analyzes what went wrong. Guess what: that process itself takes forever. "Gathering error reports", "Analyzing logs", wtf??

Remember that I said that the previous part was the worst? Actually, no. This is the worst: the program that analyzes what went wrong ACTUALLY FROZE. It wasn't responding... it got stuck!! I was patient enough to wait, but it just froze. . I literally prayed that there was no program that analyzes what went wrong with this "error analyzer"...

OH, and this was on a pentium 4 pc with fresh XP install.




EDIT: Serious thread. Reps to randay for reminding me.

'ow 'ard did you try to not use any words that start with ' in this thread?