I don’t spend much time with Windows, my desktops are largely Linux and my laptops Macs. I do have one rather ageing Windows machine, that recently got borked by an update. It was when I was reinstalling the drivers and software that Windows update couldn’t find that I came across DriverTuner. What a hateful piece of software this is. I have been using computers for years, and I started early enough to remember the days when you had to manually set IRQs on hardware with little jumpers. So tracking through a website using the model numbers of my hardware isn’t much of a hardship. I don’t believe it would be to anyone really, we can all navigate websites…
Therefore I found it extremely irritating that when trying to install both my Canon printer and Epson scanner that I kept navigating to a specific page only to download DriverTuner. On the Epson site it even downloaded in a zip file that looked like the correct version of Epson Scan. DriverTuner is irritating because it doesn’t seem to work, it failed to find anything to install on my computer. Not only that it also seemed to want me to buy it. Would it have made me buy it to get my drivers? To me DriverTuner is nothing more than an annoying, overly complex, failed, solution to a almost non-existent problem. Another piece of crapware clogging up my system.
Canon at least had a version of the drivers and software somewhere on their site that I was eventually able to locate and download. It installed and worked. Epson, not so. I had to resort to chatting to a helper to get a link to a page that I could download the driver from. Why, manufactures, insist on making everyone download this software? Why not let people try the automatic method if they want, and let those of us who want to just go to site and get the driver without any fuss do that?