Drivers, Drivers, Drivers

How often do you re-install your Windows?
Unfortunately, after a certain time, Windows gets old and slow and it's time to replace it with .. Windows. Why this must be so, nobody knows, for my Linux installation has no such problems.
Well, aside from the fact that Windows XP installer always overwrites the boot records which means that I need to boot Linux from a CD later and restore things.
Microsoft, your's is (contrary to your belief) _not_ the only OS out there, so please either:
a) Make a boot loader that recognises this fact, or
b) Add an option _not_ to replace the boot loader.

Still, once that it done, the only thing left is to configure the system in a way I like it.
Swap files, disable error reporting, system restore, disable security center, watch the "windows xp tour", remove MSN, Windows Catalogue and some other useless icons that find their way into every new install's Start Menu.
Then comes the most tedious task: Installing drivers.

In the olden days, we had a driver CD (which a hi-tech friend burned for us) and we'd simply click through the exe files and restart about 50 times. All in all, it was done in about 3 hours or so.
But nowadays, with all the internets and security vulnerabilities, you have to have the _latest and greatest_ drivers and right when windows is freshly installed is the proper time to install those to. So, you open the ugly Internet Explorer 5.5 and head over to google, only to discover that your network card isn't working.
So you take an USB key and head over to the parent's/neighbor's/friend's computer and download the network card driver.

Which is 69Mb. It will not fit your 64Mb Kingston USB key. The friend has no CD burner. You are then forced (if you are smart) to split the file into two parts and add a utility to 'un-split' it later. Then just make two trips.

Finally, network card working and you can get online with your 512Kbps cable modem and search for other drivers.
Here is an average list:
VIA chipset: 12Mb
Intel chipset: 2Mb
NVIDIA chipset: 70Mb
ATI graphics card: 35Mb or 14Mb (but the smaller one is second on the list, so most people select the larger one)
NVIDIA graphics card: 46Mb
Creative sound card: 40Mb
HP Printer: 50 - 150Mb

And this is mostly all you need for the basic system to work, on average about 200Mb to download. Which with the aforementioned line takes 60 minutes to download and about half an hour of restarting to install.
It seems better, no?
But wait, there's more. After all that is done, Windows asks you to please install the following 90 windows updates, which take a few hours to get and you don't really dare to use the computer without them, lest you get a nasty virus or adware.

The point I'm trying to get across is that sometimes I don't have the luxury of 100Mbps fiber connection and am instead on a relatively slow line. Sometimes I even need a particular driver or update on the road, which limits me too about 128Kbps cell phone connection.
In such cases in particular do I find it rather irritating that I should download more than 20Mb for a single driver.

After all, some of us are perfectly comfortable with the way Windows XP settings dialog boxes look and their functionality and I don't particularly need 150Mb worth of software for a printer that allows me to print at a 4,78 degree angle (I very rarely do that).

Cut the crap away and produce nice, 2-5Mb basic drivers (I just need the *.inf, *.sys, *.dll and probably a few others. I don't need fancy installers with hot images of naked women parading the latest and greatest network card. And sound in installers is not nice either.)

Incidentally, this will also get rid of any automatic updaters, driver control panels, assisting processes and similar, which I'd be very grateful for in order to clean up my Task List.

Oh, and _please_ cut us some slack with product names, okay?
There are two extremes I noticed. One is the overly-abundant-imagination names, such as (i.e.) "Deathmatch Ultimate NetExtremity 2.0 Bloodshed Fatality enhancing accelerator". The other extreme is purely numeric, such as "Graphics card 3.456 v2 S/N: 68rty8456".

Both are rather useless. A special note to some WiFi network card vendors (I'm thinking of you, Linksys and Netgear), who replace the entire chipset on a wireless network card and simply change the revision from A1 to A2 (a tiny tiny marking on the side of the 3rd contact pin).
Try getting one with a particular chipset from some store where they can't even distinguish between different cards from the same vendor. If you replace the whole freaking chipset in a card, please, please, change the name a bit more than in the last digit, okay? Some people _need_ to know what exactly the card contains.

Thank you for your attention.