A plea to PC manufacturers

[MaddAussie]

(and motherboard manufacturers)

Please can you make your driver downloads:

a/ Easy to find
b/ with meaningful filenames
or best of all
c/ Give me one zip file containing all the latest drivers for one machine (or motherboard).

Thank you

[kalniel]

Dell. Type in your service tag and you get a custom built page full of everything you could possibly want for your machine. Has been like that for years.

[MaddAussie]

I know that but I'd like just one zip with all the drivers (yes I'm lazy) instead of having to click through a load of pages to get all the drivers for building a machine is a PITA

Dell are one of the worst for giving non meaningful filenames to drivers.

[pipTheGeek]

At least Dell downloads don't take an age. I'm a big fan of Asus motherboads (simply becuase of their q-connector for the front panel stuff) but their downloads are SLOW! Waiting 45 minutes for a driver to download is not right. I have actually had downloads from them that achieved a peak speed of 500 bytes per second.

My neighbour has an off the shelf PC, it shipped with a recovery disc for XP, they then put first XP pro and then win 7 on it. No one has the sound drivers available for download. I found an intel motherboard that has the same basic sound hardware and downloaded the drivers for that.

So I would add, not only make the drivers easy to find but keep supporting them and keep them available for download for a significant period of time. A motherboard is for life, not just for christmas.

[Pob255]

Having spent over an hour on the Foxconn website yesterday for this very reason, I FULLY agree.

I'd also like to add in a couple of additional sugestions

Don't bother having a search function on your website when it's TOTAL JUNK, what good is a search function when you put in the model number of the motherboard and it returns "no results."
Most ot the time when I want to find something on a manufactures website I have to you google to search the site to find it.

One for MSI, if you must give your OEM products a seperate Model number (even when it's exactly the same as the retail model) then include that OEM model number on your web site.

When a Product is EOL don't remove it from the website all together, (it's like they are trying to pretend they never made it and only make the latest thing) if you don't want it in with all your new products, that's fine, put it in an Old model, Archive or Discontinued section, DON't just delete the entries.

For me the one saving grace from some of these manufactures is some rather good auto-update programs . . . However make the auto-updater findable on your website!
(The Foxconn auto-updater is actually very good, but could I find it? could I hell, I eventually found the driver page for the motherboard I was working on, but the utility section was empty, I had to get it from the download page of a different model, but what's truely annoying is it works so well and for all their boards, so why oh why isn't it in a general utility section, why do you have to hunt down one of a small handfull of motherboard models that include the download link to get it?)



Sorry about this Rant but it does really annoy me, esp when relatively quick 10min jobs turn into hour long jobs just because I'm having to try to find the right page on a manufactures website just to get the drivers I need.

[hibby]

At least Dell downloads don't take an age. I'm a big fan of Asus motherboads (simply becuase of their q-connector for the front panel stuff) but their downloads are SLOW! Waiting 45 minutes for a driver to download is not right. I have actually had downloads from them that achieved a peak speed of 500 bytes per second.

If I remember correctly, the trick is to select the Asian server in preference to anything else as you tend to get almost reasonable speeds. Strapping a USB drive to a dead snail would give you a better transfer rate than some of their servers.

[pipTheGeek]

Had to go near the ASUS website again. Asian server doesn't exist anymore. I have the options of Global or China. And China just says too busy, try again later. Global achived 2KB/s then died after an hour and a half. I resorted to the download manager this morning. Currently managing 30KB/s. Oh, and it didn't resume, I've had to start again.
It's at times like this that I'm glad I pay for this super fast broadband.

As if having to deal with the ASUS site isn't bad enough. I want an audio driver for an Abit board. Guess what! It is currently downloading at 8KB/s.

Maybe I should ask them to just write a hex dump of the file and fax it to me.

[Joe of Loath]

I've not dealt with drivers much since switching to Linux (Yey, kernel-mode drivers!), but they're a PITA when I try to set up a Windows box, especially on old hardware.

[Kumagoro]

Having to get drivers for laptops when you do a non recovery install always gets on my tits.

The service tag thing for dells, HP/compaq is what should be the minimum standard.
Sony although I am not sure if it is for all models has a zip pack for drivers.

By far the worst though is Advent, its just a joke.

You would think by now they would have a program which would auto recognise which drivers
are missing and need to be installed.

[quintal]

Amen to all that.

Oh, and HP, give your driver files some human readable name, not just "R123456". It is a real pain to work out what's what 6 months later when you try to rebuild the system. Last time I ended up downloading again...

[pipTheGeek]

I have a drivers folder. It's the only part of my filesystem that is actually organised. One folder named after the motherboard make/model and some memorable fact, like who owns one. Inside which are folders for each device / driver and inside that is the actual driver file.

After all my trouble downloading the sound card driver, did windows update on the PC in question and it offered a sound card driver. WTF did it not find that when I told it to search online for drivers!?

[shakerist]

For everyone complaining about asus download speeds have you ever heard of flashget download accelerator, download install and paste the download link and off you go. on websites where i get 50kb/s i put link in there and get 300 kb min

[shaithis]

Windows does an excellent job with drivers these days....there aren't many I would considering installing manually any more.

[Golden Dragoon]

I really dislike HP, had to sort out my brothers laptop a little while ago, and the random file names, plus 5 different and incompatible wireless drivers it gave me for download on his model were infuriating