I’m borrowing my roommate’s HP printer/scanner to do some work on, and the bare minimum for driver installs is 600MB. Is this common? Not to get all “get off my lawn,” but really? How can that be necessary? Even my bloated OS gives me immensely more bang for the buck (or the megabyte) than that. I know printing is often the bane of computer interfacing, but I refuse to believe that they couldn’t get this thing running smoothly for, say 100MB worth of drivers. That’s a lot of freaking code!
I never install printer drivers. If you’re running XP, 2000, or Vista, just plug the damn printer right into the USB port (it IS USB, right?) Odds are, it’s about 10 MB of drivers, and 550MB of “bloatware” from HP.
I saw the thread title and just knew this was going to be HP. I had this problem with one of their all-in-one printers once - no bare drivers were available - you had to install the ‘print managment system’ or some such - which hijacked file associations, modified context menus, inserted toolbars into the browser and other applications, and on top of that, caused MS office to become highly unstable.
BTW, the way to work around it (if your OS doesn’t natively support the printer) is as follows:
-Share the printer on the unfortunate machine that has the whole bundle installed
-Add your computer to the same network
-Install the network printer on it (this will snag a copy of just the necessary drivers)
-Disconnect your PC from the network and plug in the printer - the ‘found new hardware’ thing should now be able to install it using the copied drivers.
Over half a GB of drivers for a printer? Sounds way over the top. If it were me I’d delete the drivers and start fresh. Just download the latest driver for that printer.
As Mangetout said, HP is famed for bloating things up beyond recognition - in addition to the actual print driver, there’s the web-based supplies monitor, the photo sharing application, the photo editing application, the scanner driver, the scanner OCR application, the scanner image filing application, the fax driver, the fax sending/receiving/archiving application, and on and on.
Happily, most HP printers will work with a basic driver such as Deskjet 820C or Laserjet 4. You just need to do some poking around and searching for info on alternate drivers. **Big tip: ** Look for info on drivers to use when sharing the printer. The extra features like scanning and fax aren’t sharable, but printing is, so HP will usually grudgingly admit somewhere that there’s a much smaller driver package that will work just fine.
Have you looked for a “corporate” driver or similar? I have an OfficeJet 7130. The regular driver with the HP Director software is a couple hundred MB. The slimmed-down corporate driver, which just has the driver and a basic scanning utility, is about 20 MB.