Ordinary Gweilo

Wasn’t the “plug’n’play” concept supposed to make it easy to install hardware?  Whatever happened to that idea?

I recently purchased an HP Printer, which came with some software has that has to be installed before the printer is connected to the computer (the documentation contains a solemn warning that you must not connect the printer before installing the software).  Well, not just “some” software but several hundred megabytes of it.  I remember when PCs only had 100mb of disk, and now HP insist I need 500mb just to install the software to control a printer?  The world’s gone mad.

Now, it happens that I do have a few gigabytes of space, but just not on the ‘C’ drive (which has Windows on it).  The space is on the ‘F’ drive, so that’s where I wish to install the software.  Shouldn’t be a problem, right?   Wrong.

On my first attempt, Mr HP insisted that I install his bloatware on the C drive because he had found older versions of the software there, so I had to remove them first (probably a good idea anyway) and start again.  Then on the second attempt I got a message to say that there wasn’t enough free space on my C drive.  It seems that HP aren’t at all interested in all that space on the F drive, and insisted that I cancel the installation.

So now I decided to take my life into my hands and plug in the printer without installing the software.  Nothing bad happened – it asked me to load the CD and I managed to find an option on the install program to load the driver and a few other bits and pieces.  This time it went through the disk space check, and then (cue drum roll) it allowed me to choose which drive to use.  Brilliant.

Just a thought, but might it not be smart for HP to allow you to choose the drive before checking for available space?   

Idiots.