Recently I had the pleasant task of reinstalling Windows. Long story short, I needed the Media Center capabilities for my Xbox 360. I will probably talk about this some other time. Anyway, after numerous reboots – we are talking 10+ – to have a basic Windows MCE running with the latest security patches, Danish language pack, etc. I reached the point of installing all my additional hardware not installed by Windows. Most things are O.K. and requires a small driver download and a quick install, but the dreaded Logitech QuickCam Messenger driver is a joke. It’s 33 megs in size, granted the driver for my ATI graphics card is quite big as well, but it actually adds some useful functionality.
It’s not so much downloading the 33 megs that bothers me, with broadband it doesn’t take very long. No, it’s the options you get when installing this so-called “driver”. The required disk space is a whopping 70+ megs! What is this? Clearly must be a joke.
Anyway, when asked where I want to perform a typical or custom installation, I chose custom – it surely must be possible to not installed at least some of the junk (or utility applications if you will). And here is the fun part. I was able to deselect the driver, and that’s it. The required disk space was lowered to about 50 megs – but why would I install the damn thing without the driver, that’s why I downloaded this thing anyway.
I continue with what seems to be a “typical-custom” installation and when it finally completes, Windows needs to reboot once again. After the reboot I have a ton of new Logitech applications plus a Windows Explorer extension for something called My Logitech Pictures (or whatever) and all I wanted was a driver so I can use my webcam with messenger.
At this point I was kind of pissed off and went straight for Add/Remove programs. To my big surprise there was two installed Logitech application: Logitech Camera-driver and the other I can’t remember the name of, but it was quite clear that this second one contained all the junk, so I quickly uninstalled it (and had to reboot – suprise!)
Now all is fine and dandy. The webcam works and I don’t have all the Logitech applications I didn’t want in the first place. Why oh why couldn’t I just get the option when installing. I guess this teaches me not to buy Logitech products again – at least webcams, since I really like the keyboard I’m typing on right now and it’s also a Logitech product 🙂
Once again I have been confirmed in my choice of using Ubuntu Linux as my primary desktop is not a bad one!