Bloatware

Finally upgraded the home computer inkjet printer. The ten year old HP 600, with the erratic paper feed, got retired to the town transfer station (aka dump) and replaced by a one year old HP 4260, kindness of youngest son who won't be needing it at college.
XP's plug&play detected the new printer but lacked a driver for it. Since all good drivers are on the net, I was able to down load the right one from the HP website. 35 Megabytes of printer driver. Oink. The old 600 driver came on a pair of 3.5" floppy discs, total capacity 2 megabytes. So, software to do the same task, has grown 17.5X fatter over ten years. Are all the competant programmers retired or what?
Also noticed the new drivers didn't use plug & play (aka plug & pray). HP was very firm about loading the driver BEFORE hooking up the printer, which totally defeats the plug and play logic in XP. Plug and play was supposed make driver loading dead easy for the user. XP polls the hardware to see what was out there at each boot time, and only if it can't find a driver does it go thru the "New hardware detected; Please insert diskette" routine. Good idea, but MS never got the bugs out of it I guess. I did a plug&play driver back in Win 98 days, and the intense pain required to get it to work is still fresh in my memory. Looks like the pain is still there, causing the HP guys to bypass plug&play. One of the reasons for XP's sluggish boot up is all the time spent polling all the hardware, every time it boots.