Ah here’s a fun one. I have a not so old HP ScanJet that every once in a while I need to fire up when I have problems faxing over my VOIP phone line (which seems to be happening quite frequently). So rather than faxing I scan the document and fire it off via email instead, or if necessary via my MaxEmail fax service account.
I always dread this tough because I don’t install the driver for the scan jet unless I absolutely have to – every scanner I’ve ever owned has tried to take over my system from startup to shutdown. I was doubly worried because this is a Vista machine with RC1 on it.
To my surprise the plain driver install worked just fine – the scanner fired right up in Paint Shop and I was able to scan the documents I needed and fax them off. I was fat and happy.
Until I rebooted. Aaaack! I forgot to take out the HP installation disk, so when the system rebooted HP’s friendly software took it onto itself to install the whole suite of crap software that I don’t need. I figured no big deal I can just uninstall, but while I was trying to navigate my machine to – well anywhere, the box locked up. Dead, no keyboard, no mouse even going to sleep didn’t work. Reboot. Machine comes up and goes into the same lock cycle.
It took me two more reboots in Safe Mode to get all the HP crap removed and get my machine back to square one.
Man, I really hate todays printer and scanning software. HP is the worst of them, but others are not far behind. A recent Epson printer installation wasn’t much different – it also wanted to install a half a gig worth of software I don’t need. All I need is a printer (or scanner).
Seriously this sorta shit oughta be illegal. This is like somebody coming to your house and painting a nice big fat #@! you on your front door. It’s downright property damage.
In most cases you can of course get around this shit by just installing the drivers, but of course your mom isn’t going to know that. She’ll be happy to put in the disk and let the stuff install. What really bites about this is that the software that is ‘freely’ dished out by the benevolence of the hardware vendor is usually the biggest piece of crap in existence (otherwise they wouldn’t be giving it away) and more importantly it often is something that seriously impacts the machine. I use my scanner maybe once every two months if that, yet HP insists on installing itself in my startup group and drivers that hook into the start tray. Is this really necessary?
A large part of why Windows machines are so unstable and become dog slow is for stuff like this. Printer software that monitors your printer reservoir but takes up 50 megs of memory? Yup that’s my old Epson printer monitor. I don’t mind if that’s there when I use it but I really don’t need to know that my printer has 100% ink every second of the day…
<sigh> this all will probably get even worse with Vista all in the name of making the consumers life easier. Yeah right – tell that to my mom when she calls me because her computer crashed due to a bad driver… and we all know those family calls are the best tech support calls of them all (did you plug in the computer? <s>)…