Warning: Dull computer content follows.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
What is it about drivers, but especially printer drivers these days?<\/p>\n
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 (!).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
Anyone?<\/p>\n
Anyway, after a week of instability, I found the driver package ‘for IT Professionals Only’, and installed it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading Driving Me Crazy<\/span>