My My....

[DR]

Today we reinstalled one of our old Dual Opteron boxes to use for another purpose - but this time it would be running Windows 2003 over FreeBSD which we had standardised upon.

Anyway - the issue, I wasn't in the datacentre and I'd got as far as Windows being installed but one problem - no network drivers in the Windows CD...erk! I thought this isn't good probably a 20MB download but getting it on to the server would be the challenge.

To my suprise - it was 94KB for the entire driver setup - sub 100KB for the networking drivers, incredible huh? Shows how much blotware is often put in these things

... So I got an engineer to put a floppy disk in one of our servers - I copied the file on and then got the box up and running

I wish everyone would do small driver stacks....

Props to Broadcom!

[Steve]

If you actually go down into a driver installer's cab files you can often grab drivers for most anything and get them sub 100KB.

You're right in that most of it has bloatware around it.

I like my drivers in a zip file containg a cat file, an inf and maybe a couple of sys files.

Edit: Interestingly, what you'll often find is that for the "rarer" Operating Systems like XP X64, where the vendor CBA to actually port their software, they recompile just the drivers so you lose the bloatware... wooo! Same can be true for server editions too... might be the case here.

[slugs]

its never going to pass microsoft hardware certification being that small. make it bigger and people will think its more complicated. its normally the installers that take up all the space