Drivers Drive Me Dizzy

Why is it that every piece of hardware I buy these days comes with drivers that simply do not work? It seems that no matter how new the product is, the drivers it ships with will be useless and I'll be forced to go hunt down updated versions. As a developer I know that bugs happen, but this is getting ridiculous.

Today it was a new LinkSys router and 3 LinkSys NICs. These are all brand new products (they are from the new 802.11G product line) but before I could use them I had to download new drivers for the NICs and flash the router's BIOS.

Normally this isn't too much of a problem, I just download the drivers and move on. But this just happen to be in the new office that currently has no internet connection (see previous rant). So I ended up having to drive home and download the drivers.

For what it is worth, I'm very happy with the products now that they are working. But the amount of work it took to get them working was a bit frustrating.