One trend happening in technology over the past three years or so is bloated printer software. By bloated, I mean printer installations that require nearly one gigabyte (yes almost 1000 megabytes) of hard drive space! Call me old or nostalgic, but I miss the days where printers could be installed from a floppy disk and took less than three minutes ton install. The worst offender today seems to be HP. Their popular all-in-one printers can take up to thirty minutes to install on a NEW computer and even longer on old computers. And after spending all that time, it may still not work correctly!
Try and install a newer printer on an older Windows 98 or Me computer, and you are really asking for trouble. Today, I spent nearly two hours troubleshooting a HP All-in-one installation on a Windows Me machine and still didn't get it totally functional. My wrath on bloated software started with security software (I'm talking to Norton and McAfee) a few years ago, but now I'm breaking my silence on the printer industry. Not only are their ink cartridges causing some citizens to decide between dinner and printing their digital photos, but their impact on our hard drives and system resources is way out of hand. I would like to start a grass roots back lash against the printer industry and express our disgust in long, inefficient installation processes and software that runs like molasses in January.
Do you agree or do you think I'm just full of hot air on this subject? Let me know by leaving your comments below.
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