Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Logitech is similar, tries to auto-update most days and ~200MB "driver" install.

Why the heck does a few hundred KB in actual drivers and a simply configuration program need 200MB? When I had an MS mouse intellipoint was only ~20MB, and the current MS Mouse & Keyboard Center is still only about 50MB (which still seems much larger than necessary)

View on HN

HP also has gone insane. We got a bunch of keyboards that had 3 defective keys on the numpad. Zero, slash and enter if I remember it, bog standard keys. HP Service desk says no problem, here's 512Kb of firmware update that will fix it. And it actually did. No hardware defect, just a software bug.

I have no idea why a keyboard without much interesting extras even needs 512K of firmware, let alone why the stock firmware fails on 3 of the buttons. They're only there since 1985 or so, you'd think they got around to test the numeric pad by now

At least they didn't make you pay to unlock those keys as "premium DLC".

The thing about Logitech (at least on Windows) is that it installs the updater as a device driver. So you cannot easily even block its internet access via firewall rules unless you define one for rundll32.exe

If you want to know more about it, just google "Logitech Download Assistant". There should be a device for it in your Device Manager and an LDA.exe process running.

I used to wonder about these things as well. But now that we are used to electron, I wonder why technical people still are surprised.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com