PJG said:
I bought a lovely camera which starts downloading and doesn't seem to stop.
Could someone tell me how many bytes this camera's software is at present? I
feel that this method is not functional if you have to spend many irritable
hours downloading software just because microsoft wants to keep their
software up to date. If I buy a product I'd like the product to work and not
have to spend more money on bandwidth and time, having to download software.
NUTS!
The sad part is, that the software could be stripped a bit if they put their
minds to it.
Your LifeCam2.04.exe 47376KB download, consists of the following uncompressed stuff.
dotnetfx3 - this installs a library. The library may be shared by some
future program. Microsoft would consider that a big win.
However, if the camera is the only thing using it, a better
usage of the bytes, would be to only include the code
actually needed. Installer size 2877KB
dx90c - a copy of DirectX presumably. Most people already have this.
This is a waste of about 4MB. They could manage this, by
prompting the user for a separate download if DirectX was
actually missing the required version, so you'd only download
the 4MB if it was needed.
wmfdist - Another library, 9402KB. May have something to do with
video formats, so maybe in some sense this is worth it.
Or, you could use a similar argument to the dotnetfx3 case.
setup - This folder contains twelve files of 3534KB each. I expect
these are language specific. If the download page prompted
you for the desired language, then 11*3534 = 38874KB of uncompressed
data could be eliminated in the download.
The "effects" subfolder, would be to make little animations
of stuff to overlay on the basic camera image. This folder
is about 41MB of stuff. I expect most people would not care
about this kind of cruft. If it was the "value added" of the
product (the reason you bought the camera), then maybe the
final download would be half its current size.
The above numbers are for the uncompressed data, so when it is compressed,
it is hard to say how much each contributes to the overall download.
A rough guess though, is this download could be considerably smaller,
if they really cared about their customers still on dialup. And there
are plenty of those, who aren't close enough to a telco for ADSL.
I've seen "driver" packages of up to 200MB offered on the Internet,
for no particularly good reason, so Microsoft is not the only company
guilty of this kind of practice. I've tried to maintain my parents
computer on dialup, and it is virtually impossible to do with
dialup because of the amount of stuff that needs to be downloaded
for one reason and another. There is no time to "surf", when the
dialup connection is busy for hours doing downloads. Even the daily
AV file updates cut into surf time.
On my own web cam, there is an option to install "drivers" or to
install "drivers + cruft". Unfortunately, the driver only option,
doesn't allow adjusting the camera. If they included just one
control panel for camera control, plus the driver, I'd be able
to leave the cruft out. As it is, my webcam leaves four
(unnecessary) tasks running in Task Manager, which it should
dump if the camera was disconnected. My camera is a Logitech,
and isn't much better in the software department. I actually
uninstall the software, between usages of the camera! That
should tell the staff at Logitech, something about their
product... Too intrusive and bloated.
Paul
