¶Bloat

I just downloaded the latest trackpoint/trackpad driver for a laptop for a reinstall, and ended up with this:

I don't mind a bit of expansion, but WTF... 59MB for a mouse driver??? That's almost as bloated as a printer driver.

I took a look at the expanded resources, and the big offender is that it includes the entire 43MB .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile installer. Apparently it was worth dragging in the latest version of .NET in order to use WPF in the control panel, which, by the way, was already installed. On top of that, there are both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of executables that contain a ton of very large, uncompressed bitmap resources which presumably made up the bulk of the remaining 16MB of download. This took a while to download over a 1.5Mbps connection.

Is it too much to ask for just a little bit of attention to size?

Comments

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