Camera Drivers and Crapware

I recently helped someone setup their net laptop and they were upset because their camera drivers weren't working with Vista and nothing happened when they plugged in their camera. I told them that with modern operating (Linux, OSX, XP and Vista) systems you don't need to install drivers to use most things, and most cameras show up as USB mass storage or an external hard drive in the (My) Computer window.

If you have already installed drivers for your camera and it doesn't show up in the Computer window, then try uninstalling the drivers. To do that, plug your camera in to the computer, then click the start button (XP) or Windows Orb (Vista) and then right click on (My) Computer and select Manage. When the Computer Management window opens, click on Device Manager in the left panel. In the right panel you will see the device list. If you see an yellow warning triangles, ten you should right-click that device and select to uninstall that device. You may have to restart your computer for the changes to take effect.

Another thing you should never do with a camera is install the 'helpful' companion software that comes with the camera. Most of this software is poorly made, not easy to use an, takes a large amount of hard drive space and adds extra programs that will run at start up and slow down your new computer. A example of this is the software that came with the HP camera that I use. The camera had a 7 Mb driver, a program to import the photos from the camera and put them in my Pictures folder, a program to edit the photos and a program to sort an tag the pictures. All of these programs took up a total of 1.37 gigabytes! I uninstalled all of it, then used Windows built in USB mass storage driver in place of the 7Mb driver, just drag-n-dropped the pictures to my Pictures folder instead of using the photo importer, I used GIMP to edit the photos instead of the bundled editor, and I don't tag my photos, but if I did then I would of used Picasa for the tagging and album making instead of the bundled tagger. I got all of the functionality of the bundles software for only about the 25Mb that the GIMP uses! And if I use Picasa then it would of only been about 45Mb! Plus I didn't get anything added to my start up list, so my computer still runs fast!

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