Warning: Dull computer content follows.
I’ve had a bit of an frustrating time this afternoon with printer drivers on my Mom’s PC. Her trusty old HP Deskjet 710 was broken, so a nice new Officejet 6000 found it’s way there.
What is it about drivers, but especially printer drivers these days?
They always come as a executable program, with an installer, and lots of complexity and bloat- the full driver package for this HP is a 200MB download (!).
What I don’t understand is that Windows comes with an accepted way of installing drivers: You plug in the hardware, it gets detected, then you insert a CD had has a .inf file with instructions in it, and a set of drivers, and then the OS copies the files, and it works.
This results in (relatively) tiny downloads, a standard interface, and stable hardware generally. Why do manufacturers feel the need to bypass this and introduce unstable, bloated drivers?
Anyone?
Anyway, after a week of instability, I found the driver package ‘for IT Professionals Only’, and installed it.
Beats me. I’m at a loss as well. Obviously though the “non-IT professionals” bit means its for numpties and so you need more software so it screws up and then you can call the It Professionals to fix it – or am I being cynical?
Marketing and fear
the bloatware usually include stuff on buy ink online, ‘free’ (light edition) software from some vendor who has paid HP to bundle it , in the hope someone will but the full package
On the subject of CDs etc, WTF is with providing install CDs with routers
Cable routers, usually just work,
ADSL routers just work on BT (no password required these days)
the rest have a realy simple UI for setting up the password etc
so why install all the branding CRAP , i do not want a “provided by XXXXXXX” on the top of every web page
You are probably right about the bundled bloat, just like if you buy a PC.
Wasn’t aware that BT no longer need user/pass- is it tied to the line like cable gets tied to the cable modem?
re BT ADSL, yes, for domestic consumers, it has been tied to the line for a while, in fact it seems to be really odd, if authentication fails you get a BT connection even if on some other ISP, but then is does not route properly
When ZENs Radius server had a monent few years ago, on a friends line, he got a BT IP address for a while,
But for BT business, i believe it still required a user ID and password, but again that may all change with the roll out of WBC.
make sense really, within the limits of vandlism or hi-tech criminals the end of a phone line is well defined and constrained.