Back in my Window days. I would start the driver installation and let it sit. Open the temp folder and copy content the install extracted to a new directory. Cancel the installation. Open Device Manager and install the drivers from there so non of the excessive bloat was installed.
This worked greater with being an IT consultant. The client's machine to run smoother and drivers installed fast since they would buy multiples of the same equipment at once.
Now I only use Linux on personal equipment. You have to pay me to use Microsoft products. Microsoft has become shit-ware.
To be fair Microsoft was always shitware. I don’t remember a time when using a Windows machine just worked, didn’t take up gigabytes of space, didn’t crash, and didn’t get messed up by simply using it requiring a yearly or semi-yearly reinstall.
I remember when Windows didn't take gigabytes of space because there wasn't gigabytes of space, and it was still shitware.
Windows in the 95-XP era wasn't exactly high-quality software, but it was genuine technical innovation, doing what you otherwise couldn't do.
Windows 7 was also incredibly good.
And yeah, there was some pretty neat stuff. Of Linux, macOS and Windows, Windows was the first to get GPU crash recovery, just chugging onward after a stall instead of bringing the entire system down.
The biggest sign for me that Microsoft just doesn't care about Windows (aside from the ads stuffed everywhere after a fresh install) is they stopped caring about its bones. Where is Windows' equivalent of APFS / BTRFS (or even EXT4)..? NTFS is more than 20 years old by now.
> Where is Windows' equivalent of APFS / BTRFS (or even EXT4)..? NTFS is more than 20 years old by now.
There's ReFS, but a lot of NTFS features are basically baked into the filesystem API, so replacing it is hard.
That being said, NTFS works extremely well and reliable. I don't really see a compelling need to replace it (which is always a messy transition unless you're completely backwards-compatible -- but in that case, NTFS has evolved a lot already).
Nothing since then. Thats a long 30 years.
Windows 3.1? It was only 6 3.5” disks.
To be fair, I had stretches of 2K, XP, 7 and 10 working acceptably.
These eras of Windows had their own dark patterns that were incredibly anti-consumer. No one's lives were improved because they installed the Ask Jeeves toolbar, but people were asked to install it millions and millions of times.
Microsoft BASIC was a pretty decent interpreter, I wouldn't call it "shitware", so there you go?
I don't remember DOS 6.22 blue screening on me. Maybe it wasn't so bad.
I would have preferred a Forth on my C64 seriously. But no, we were stuck with this "38911 bytes free" crap.
7zip will do the trick for a lot of self extractors.
When .INF was all you needed (and some .cat / sys)! More recently, I found out that approach can sometimes lead to missing features when using the hardware. Even though the driver is installed correctly. I was probably missing something but didn't dig deeper into it.
These days, even a window gets updates.
https://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=lastwin.95