Yeah the huge ass drivers were always a mystery to me (I never really cared to "investigate" it really though). Always jokingly thought, are they hiding secret BMP or RAW images in there or what? 😁 How can a simple driver (not including bundled bloatware) be 50+ MB??
Boohyaka wrote on 2020-09-15, 06:26:Yeah the huge ass drivers were always a mystery to me (I never really cared to "investigate" it really though). Always jokingly thought, are they hiding secret BMP or RAW images in there or what? 😁 How can a simple driver (not including bundled bloatware) be 50+ MB??
Some drivers include pretty graphics and animations about the printer (i.e.: your printer is out of paper, so we will show some images about how to load it). And I remember that some Canon drivers included every language in the world in the same package... not big files but a whole bunch of them (the files were in the package, but the driver installed only the correct one).
I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...
Last week I picked up a YMF724 based PCI sound card with the SB-Link headers to replace the YMF744 in my P2 which doesn't have SB-Link headers for better compatibility with my 440bx board.
I could not get it working properly at all, every time I removed the card from device manager it would simply come back as a YMF744, reboot, not initialise and sometimes just crash during loading. I couldn't be bothered tracking down every related driver file in the windows folders to delete them. I tried a zipped driver pack, burning a different 724 driver cd and installing that way, even tried to use the A-open cobra CD, each time being detected as a ymf744 and using the old drivers.
formatted the damn thing again. i'm using a 724 driver cd install, full functionality, i can change IRQ to anything in system resources but now i'm missing the cool system tray icon... oh well. I think it's a vxd driver as opposed to wdm so I think I've lost analogue audio playback in daemon tools... this might be a dealbreaker so i could be faced with another upgrade of drivers which could break it even more... im dreading the thought! ahhhh!
Ugh, HP all in ones!
We've got a Officejet 8600, Wasn't impressed I couldn't use both wired and wireless network at the same time, older models could.
but hey, at least it can notify HP when our ink's low so they can see us more direct. (or something like that, it's turned off)
I hate drivers and software that insist on putting icons in the system tray with no option to disable. After a clean build I usually delete everything in the Windows\CurrentVersion\Run key.
Ha just came across another one of my enemies - "let me pick for you the language that I suppose you'd like with no option to change it".
Nvidia 45.23 drivers on Win98. I'm a French-speaking Swiss, but like everything on my computers to be in English. Still, to have the metric system, proper 24h time, currency and number separators, I set my "Regional settings" to French (Swiss). Those damn drivers follow that stupid setting and display all menus in French (in piss poor translation quality as a cherry on top).
Why would ANYONE think that it is a good idea to set the language based on a REGIONAL SETTING which is a FORMATTING option? Why not follow the bloody OS language by default, and better yet, offer an option to change the language? And btw, if you change your regional settings and reboot, the program follows the new setting even after being installed. So I can't set it to English, install drivers, then switch back to French. Bottom line, if I want to keep my French (Swiss) regional setting, I need to deal with Nvidia being in piss-poor French. Gah.
Makes my blood boil. I want to retroactively see a manager 😁
By the way if anyone knows a registry tweak to force the language for those drivers, I'm all ears. I looked for it but couldn't find anything, and googling brings stuff for more recent driver versions and the registry structure is all different.
Boohyaka wrote on 2020-09-15, 08:37:Ha just came across another one of my enemies - "let me pick for you the language that I suppose you'd like with no option to ch […]
Ha just came across another one of my enemies - "let me pick for you the language that I suppose you'd like with no option to change it".
Nvidia 45.23 drivers on Win98. I'm a French-speaking Swiss, but like everything on my computers to be in English. Still, to have the metric system, proper 24h time, currency and number separators, I set my "Regional settings" to French (Swiss). Those damn drivers follow that stupid setting and display all menus in French (in piss poor translation quality as a cherry on top).
Why would ANYONE think that it is a good idea to set the language based on a REGIONAL SETTING which is a FORMATTING option? Why not follow the bloody OS language by default, and better yet, offer an option to change the language? And btw, if you change your regional settings and reboot, the program follows the new setting even after being installed. So I can't set it to English, install drivers, then switch back to French. Bottom line, if I want to keep my French (Swiss) regional setting, I need to deal with Nvidia being in piss-poor French. Gah.
Makes my blood boil. I want to retroactively see a manager 😁
By the way if anyone knows a registry tweak to force the language for those drivers, I'm all ears. I looked for it but couldn't find anything, and googling brings stuff for more recent driver versions and the registry structure is all different.
Might be a workaround...
Could you find a country that has officially the English language or some little known language, but uses the metric system? Or that 99% of the time has no translation for local language?
I think of small African countries, as the market can be too small to create these localised languages.
Here in the Netherlands I run into this the opposite way: about 50/50 of software I use, uses English because it's not translated to Dutch. Small market. French is a much bigger market ofc... So much more often translated.
Stuck at 10MHz...
Boohyaka wrote on 2020-09-15, 08:37:Ha just came across another one of my enemies - "let me pick for you the language that I suppose you'd like with no option to ch […]
Ha just came across another one of my enemies - "let me pick for you the language that I suppose you'd like with no option to change it".
Nvidia 45.23 drivers on Win98. I'm a French-speaking Swiss, but like everything on my computers to be in English. Still, to have the metric system, proper 24h time, currency and number separators, I set my "Regional settings" to French (Swiss). Those damn drivers follow that stupid setting and display all menus in French (in piss poor translation quality as a cherry on top).
Why would ANYONE think that it is a good idea to set the language based on a REGIONAL SETTING which is a FORMATTING option? Why not follow the bloody OS language by default, and better yet, offer an option to change the language? And btw, if you change your regional settings and reboot, the program follows the new setting even after being installed. So I can't set it to English, install drivers, then switch back to French. Bottom line, if I want to keep my French (Swiss) regional setting, I need to deal with Nvidia being in piss-poor French. Gah.
Makes my blood boil. I want to retroactively see a manager 😁
By the way if anyone knows a registry tweak to force the language for those drivers, I'm all ears. I looked for it but couldn't find anything, and googling brings stuff for more recent driver versions and the registry structure is all different.
You can manually set the time and separators, can't you? Or switch to English (Ireland), it has the 24h time and dd/mm/yyyy.
Yep thanks of course I've thought about such workarounds, but it's still annoying, and very very poor design...
Boohyaka wrote on 2020-09-15, 08:37:Ha just came across another one of my enemies - "let me pick for you the language that I suppose you'd like with no option to ch […]
Ha just came across another one of my enemies - "let me pick for you the language that I suppose you'd like with no option to change it".
Nvidia 45.23 drivers on Win98. I'm a French-speaking Swiss, but like everything on my computers to be in English. Still, to have the metric system, proper 24h time, currency and number separators, I set my "Regional settings" to French (Swiss). Those damn drivers follow that stupid setting and display all menus in French (in piss poor translation quality as a cherry on top).
Why would ANYONE think that it is a good idea to set the language based on a REGIONAL SETTING which is a FORMATTING option? Why not follow the bloody OS language by default, and better yet, offer an option to change the language? And btw, if you change your regional settings and reboot, the program follows the new setting even after being installed. So I can't set it to English, install drivers, then switch back to French. Bottom line, if I want to keep my French (Swiss) regional setting, I need to deal with Nvidia being in piss-poor French. Gah.
Makes my blood boil. I want to retroactively see a manager 😁
By the way if anyone knows a registry tweak to force the language for those drivers, I'm all ears. I looked for it but couldn't find anything, and googling brings stuff for more recent driver versions and the registry structure is all different.
Oh so much this.
Apparently there's a switch for Installshield to override the automagic language selection, something like "setup.exe /L1033"for english or /L1040 for italian. I've never seen it work.
I usually resolve this by setting the regional settings to US English, and then go in the advanced options to change all of the settings to sane ones (SI units, 24h time, days before months, weeks that start on monday, eurodollarones and so on...).
Also on the language note, something that annoys me very much are Windows 9x updates. I've never understood if some updates were only released in English or if the localised variants were lost to the sands of time, but today if I want a fully updated (as of 2006) machine running Italian 9x some parts of it will be in English (such as netcpl.cpl for 98SE, io.sys for 98FE or whatever creates the "device not ready" errors in 95).
Re: Sound drivers force modifying startup files every time you run them
Super-annoying. Happened to me with the Yamaha Audician 32 SETUPSA utility. There at least it was a simple fix - the filenames are hardcoded in the executable as strings. Hex-edited it to point it to different (nonexistent or dummy) files - problem solved. I imagine something like this would work for most DOS drivers.
Re: Bloated printer drivers
Again super-annoying. What many people don't know is that HP printers (even all-in-ones) typically have a "driver only" version, which installs everything that's actually necessary (printer driver, all the settings applets, etc.) but none of the bloatware or apps that run on every boot / add icons to your menus / pop up every time to remind you to buy more HP crap, etc. Sometimes this "driver only" install is pretty hidden though, but I believe it can be always extracted and invoked manually from the installer archive.
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MS has always been bad at languages.
It did get better for a while but Win8/10 has taken a step back and really pushes USA formatting again.
We've also got a remote server accessed from different countries with language packs installed, I'm just lucky the Europeans using it understand language enough to fill the gaps that the GUI fails to translate.
chinny22 wrote on 2020-09-15, 15:41:MS has always been bad at languages.
It did get better for a while but Win8/10 has taken a step back and really pushes USA formatting again.We've also got a remote server accessed from different countries with language packs installed, I'm just lucky the Europeans using it understand language enough to fill the gaps that the GUI fails to translate.
The way foreign language versions of Windows work still surprises me.
On Mac OS X you basically select another language and the whole OS gets its main language switched (and not complicated stuff with input editors or numeric codes or illogical shortcuts for accented letters either). Date and time formats and the like can be set independently. You can have a western language as the main language for your OS and use Japanese/Chinese/etc. fonts at the same time with no problems. That has been the case since the earliest versions (i.e. since around 2000).
On Windows installing foreign language packs is a mess, running foreign language software too, , and even accented letters use "smart" formatting that is quite intrusive in some use cases (e.g. coding).
chinny22 wrote on 2020-09-15, 15:41:MS has always been bad at languages.
It did get better for a while but Win8/10 has taken a step back and really pushes USA formatting again.
Who doesn't like an OS with the win32 half in English and the Metro half in whatever language you set the regional settings to. And how difficult it is to change said regional settings in that clusterfuck of new control panels without getting a whole OS language pack shoved down your throat.
Dear MS, have you ever thought that perhaps, maybe, if I install en_US Windows it's because I want en_US Windows? Not like it's difficult to find installation media in the right language, between the Media Creation Tool and other sources of varying shadiness.
Ah, just remembered another one.
I had a 1995 IBM PC-330 100DX4 (6571-W5K) back in the early 2000's (one of my favorite 486 machines of all time). This thing dual booted MS-DOS 6.22/Windows For Workgroups 3.11 and Windows 98 Second Edition. Installed in it I had an I/O Magic MagicSound 16 sound card based off a ESS 1869 chipset.....Plug N' Play ISA of course.....
So it always worked great in DOS and WFW, but in Windows 98 SE.....hehehehe, good luck. The IBM PC-330's BIOS would, when in Plug N' Play mode, assign that thing to an impossibly high IRQ and Memory Address that no DOS program would even notice - like address 290 or 270 - which was fine in Windows, but good god, in a in-WIndows DOS session it was a nightmare, also, when assigned to those addresses, Windows would SOMETIMES find it, other times not (depending on where PNP Put it - hence the nickname "plug N' Pray it works"). Luckily, with the IBM PC-330 I found I could FORCE it to use the correct memory address by using the BIOS as it had an area to block off addresses from the PNP system IIRC.
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Jo22 wrote on 2020-09-12, 16:05:A story about printer drivers.. Never thrust them. 20+ years ago, when Euro banknotes were new and were still considered toy mon […]
A story about printer drivers.. Never thrust them. 20+ years ago, when Euro banknotes were new and were still considered toy money..:
*Some* people intended to made a joke and scanned one of these and tried to print it out in black/white.
The result: The printer driver noticed, printed half of the note only and threatened the user with legal actions, prison, provided an url to report himelf etc.
This makes someone wonder what could have happened if there was an established internet connection..
That actually legitimately scares me, especially in this day and age of Google taking over everything. Be glad it was 20 years ago, heh... then again, never trust a printer in the first place, they never seem to work properly 😜
I remember the hell just trying to get USB3 to work on Win7 a while back, maybe about four years ago now, on a lowend Acer laptop with only USB 3 ports/root hub. Left it sitting by for about an entire week trying to get it working, I think I had to extract from an exe file instead of using the latest version, which just made me feel stupid (then again I was 15 🤣).
Had one recently though trying to nLite touchpad drivers for this netbook I'm on now, and it just wouldn't detect the mouse at all even when uninstalling the driver. IDK what caused that...
The user this signature is attached to can be disregarded safely.
I'll add one that's maybe different from the question. Not a driver that artificially does stupid things that it shouldn't, but a driver that has an artificial stupid limitation.
My memory is a bit vague on the specifics here because it's been a couple years since I was digging into this.
As I recall there was evidence that early drivers for the integrated graphics on Intel "Kaby Lake" CPUs (iX-7xxx) were built with support for Windows 7, but that support was removed from the *.inf/whatever at the last minute. Those old versions were also hard to find by the time I looked. There were some posts on a forum somewhere (maybe Intel's) from an Intel employee who "unofficially" explained how to get the driver to install on Windows 7.
Once tricked into installing, it actually worked perfectly fine for people with those CPUs on Win7. That includes 3D acceleration.
Apparently the support was "disabled" because of Win7 EOL politics with Microsoft.
I used that driver on the next generation "Coffee Lake" i3-8130U in my laptop. It works in every way except for hardware video decoding. That makes sense because that feature was upgraded for H.265 in that CPU, so the old code is probably not compatible. I just use VLC Player (which plays videos with software decoding) so it's not a big deal.
That issue was the primary obstacle in getting Windows 7 to work on that laptop. Everything else was easy. This should have also been easy if not for the artificial nerfing of the driver.
I had the same IBM PC with DX2/66 and Sound Blaster 16, and i had exactly the same problem, no digital sound in dos games, because of high port and irq adresses by default, i just edited the Creative CTCM programs INI file by default.
creepingnet wrote on 2020-09-15, 19:32:Ah, just remembered another one.
I had a 1995 IBM PC-330 100DX4 (6571-W5K) back in the early 2000's (one of my favorite 486 machines of all time). This thing dual booted MS-DOS 6.22/Windows For Workgroups 3.11 and Windows 98 Second Edition. Installed in it I had an I/O Magic MagicSound 16 sound card based off a ESS 1869 chipset.....Plug N' Play ISA of course.....
So it always worked great in DOS and WFW, but in Windows 98 SE.....hehehehe, good luck. The IBM PC-330's BIOS would, when in Plug N' Play mode, assign that thing to an impossibly high IRQ and Memory Address that no DOS program would even notice - like address 290 or 270 - which was fine in Windows, but good god, in a in-WIndows DOS session it was a nightmare, also, when assigned to those addresses, Windows would SOMETIMES find it, other times not (depending on where PNP Put it - hence the nickname "plug N' Pray it works"). Luckily, with the IBM PC-330 I found I could FORCE it to use the correct memory address by using the BIOS as it had an area to block off addresses from the PNP system IIRC.
I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.
PS. If I upload RAR, it is a 16-bit DOS RAR Version 2.50.
SwirlyDreamy wrote on 2020-09-15, 19:40:Had one recently though trying to nLite touchpad drivers for this netbook I'm on now, and it just wouldn't detect the mouse at all even when uninstalling the driver. IDK what caused that...
I had a similar issue with an HP laptop (Intel Atom). The touchpad didn't work, but a USB mouse worked fine. That was because the touchpad was connected to an I2C device, and that I2C device was using an Intel generic driver that didn't work.
After installing HP drivers (I guess they were the "serial I/O" ones), the touchpad started to work again.
I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...
Contrary to what I thought going in to this hobby, I haven't had that many issues with old drivers and DOS/Windows 9x. It's often pretty straight forward. Wich I understand to be quiet the opposite experience from what many people had, way back when.
Maybe it's just the result of only setting these computers up as game machines instead of, everyday life, game and then some, machines.
Modern computers though? Pfft...don't get me started...
(I'm looking at you, proprietary peripheral control/RGB software)
shamino wrote on 2020-09-16, 03:16:Apparently the support was "disabled" because of Win7 EOL politics with Microsoft.
I think it was mostly to reduce the validation efforts. They just don't want to commit that this configuration will work, because then they'll have to double the validation, testing, and bugfix efforts.
shamino wrote on 2020-09-16, 03:16:That issue was the primary obstacle in getting Windows 7 to work on that laptop. Everything else was easy. This should have also been easy if not for the artificial nerfing of the driver.
This frequently happens on Intel GPUs, and in fact it goes both directions. For example, old iGPUs have drivers that do install on anything newer than Win7 by default, and can be 'hacked' to install on Win10 the same way.
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