Chacham's Journal: Rant: Drivers downloads act like they are already installed.

Why are NIC drivers sized for network downloads, instead of being sized for floppies?

Why are graphic card driver download sites designed to take advantage of the drivers the user does not yet have?

Why are some computer manufacturers removing the floppy before USB drives are in most systems?

When i install Windows i come usually across these issues. Is it that the quest for the new necessarily assumes the old is an impediment to progress? Does the rush to the future require leaving the old behind as useless?

Another reason i like Linux is that it is designed for the old, but also takes advantage of the new. As opposed to the Windows mentality of designing for the new, but try to make it backwards compatible for the old. Then again, backwards compatibility on Windows is pretty good, that is, if it ran on Windows 3.1, or even in DOS, it will most likely run on a shiny new system. On Linux, it'll need to be recompiled to be the correct binary. Or something like that. Then again, with the source, it can be changed as well.

Well, that's it for now. Thanks to some file splitter, i got the nine-floppies across for the NIC so i can actually download everything else.

According to the salespeople at the Vista Launch

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Windows has fallen behind on drivers in general, and video drivers in specific. 90% of the BSODs experienced by Windows XP users can be traced to video drivers. DirectX10 is supposed to fix this.