Time for a good old fashioned rant. Today, my target is Intel. Firstly, Intel make great hardware. Their Core 2 Duo processors are excellent. However, today I went to reformat a machine with an Intel motherboard. Of course, as the board was new compared to Windows XP, then I had to go out and get chipset/LAN drivers etc. So I went to the Intel website, and found the LAN drivers, and started the download. Then came the double-take.

Eighty six megabytes for LAN DRIVERS?! This is unacceptable. Software cannot have bloated that much over the years. All it is, is a tiny little piece of software that talks between the Windows kernel and the network card. Back in the good old Windows 95 days, a LAN driver was perhaps a few KILOBYTES. Yet this download is 86mb? Wtf?

So what can explain this? Well, it appears that Intel are bundling LAN drivers for every motherboard they make into the one package. That would be great if I were building my own unattended Windows install CD. But I’m not, I’m just installing onto one machine!

Now I’ve got to wait about half an hour for these LAN drivers to download before I kickstart my awesome autoinstaller script. I’ve got this batch file on my server that installs about 30 of the best programs at once, which is certainly a timesaver. It’s a bit like Automatix for Linux, except this is for Windows. Combined with Autopatcher, and your favourite Office apps, then you’ve got a nice desktop setup in about 45 minutes. That is, of course, excluding the download time for these drivers .

–Ben

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Rants. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.