Logitech may need to lay off the crack pipe

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12:29 am March 24th, 2007

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			Logitech may need to lay off the crack pipe - Her Most Regal Majesty, the Queen of Snark void where prohibited, except by law

sesquipedality


	Logitech may need to lay off the crack pipe
	49MB for a mouse driver. And I thought Windows was bloated.

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	From: sesquipedality	Date: March 24th, 2007 12:32 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I believe it's the same driver for any current Logitech mouse. I think it supports Logitech keyboards too, but I don't use one of those so from my perspective that's irrelevant.

Bear in mind this 49MB is a compressed archive, so the uncompressed size is probably at least half as much again.

Bear in mind that Damn Small Linux, a fully-functional desktop operating system with applications, fits on 50MB business card CD. Uncompressed.

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	From: ewx	Date: March 24th, 2007 11:09 am (UTC)		(Link)

Let me guess, the mouse works fine without even installing the driver?

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	From: sesquipedality	Date: March 24th, 2007 12:27 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Yup.

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	From: al_fruitbat	Date: March 24th, 2007 08:21 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Hmmm... I think it's not quite as strange as you make out.
Increasingly, manufacturers are rolling multiple drivers into one package, for lots of different configurations. If that's one of their 'special' mice with extra buttons, there'll be config files for that too - as well as all the different alternatives for the different versions.

Add in language packs for all languages - which is even worse if they've gone and written something on their images, helpfiles, useful libraries to be installed, and you could easily get in the tens of megs.

Linux, on the other hand, does not deal at all well with bizarrely configured hardware / out of date operating systems, and other languages. Of course, since upgrading to the newest version is free, Linux doesn't have this problem. Logitech probably need to make sure their hardware runs on Windows ME, 2000, XP and Vista, in 8 languages, and with a single download.

Also, frankly, 50Mb is nothing nowadays. With multi-Mb downstream becoming standard, the days of dialup are long gone ;-).

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	From: sesquipedality	Date: March 25th, 2007 12:06 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I suspect that you are right and that it's the help files etc. rather than the drivers themselves that make up most of the payload, and they do have their own custom GUI. I agree that the Internet these days is a broadband only club, at least where software downloads are concerned, but, I don;'t know, 50MB still seems like an awful lot for something so minor as a mouse driver.

The comparison above wasn't intended to sing the virtues of Linux over Windows. Damn Small Linux is, after all, a hack, and not a fully functional modern Linux distribution. It does, however, still support far more devices than the Logitech drivers. However, here's perhaps a more direct comparison with Microsoft's equivalent drivers for their hardware. MS Intelipoint 6.10 is 6.5MB. MS Intelitype Pro 6.1 is 6.7MB. So the equivalent software from MS, not known themselves for their devotion to frugality when coding, is only 13.2MB.

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