Today I’m fixing up yet another streamlined Windows XP CD for a friend of mine (it’s an original Windows as usual).
I have already wondered about some stuff with Windows drivers, but today it seems like stuff became even more hellish.
First, VIA stopped providing drives on Via Arena, now provide them on their site, and most importantly the download area does not work with Firefox; so I had to use Internet Explorer to download them. Way to go VIA!
Second, when I go to Asus website to download the driver for he motherboard, I’m given a captcha to complete. To download a frigging driver!
What the heck!
I downloaded a manual and bios update for my ASUS board with no captcha. Didn’t download Windows drivers though. The “choose you OS” screen is annoying, and the UI is annoying and doesn’t allow direct links to sections, but it’s workable.http://support.asus.com/dow…
ASUS is simply incredible at providing a completely unusable web site that managed to get stuck in the 90s.They seem to have fixed it now, but for a long time they started with a Flash page that was for nothing else but selecting your country. Without flash installed, you were stuck there.The support page is almost completely javascript-controlled, so you can’t open a link in a new tab (e.g. because you need drivers for _two_ ASUS products, obviously ASUS thinks they suck so much nobody would ever buy more than one product from them – while I don’t think they are that bad).And if you manage to circumvent that part it still won’t work, because they use explicitly named windows, so when you click somewhere it always replaces some other window from the ASUS page in a way you certainly didn’t want.No, you really can’t beat ASUS in idiotic web design.
Not all the ASUS downloads are captcha’d… not sure why but those for the A8N-VM CSM are, maybe it’s too old?But yeah ASUS has decent products… and indecent webpages 🙁
Asus is on my list of “never buy again” for two reasons.1) I had a lot of Asus/Asrock Mobo’s die on me with broken capacitors….more than I like or find reasonable.2) Finding up-to-date drivers/bios is pretty bad for Asus. Often they get posted on their FTP-server, but they never make it onto the actual website.2b) to add…I’ve just been busy installing Windows 7 on multiple computers.- asus p4s800D-X; no working sound except with the old driver from the driver-CD under legacy-mode (and no, that does not work very well). Check google for the frustrations of others who could not get this to work.- asus A8V: AMD cool&quiet is disabled under windows 7 due to known chipset-incompatibility….pretty annoying for such a high-end mobo. Moreover I would not be surprised if this has been the source of my trouble with that Mobo when it was running linux (it basically suffered from hick-ups, unreasonably long delays under heavy diskload).- Asus P4RD1-MX….no SATA drivers for Vista/Windows 7 anywhere on the Asus website. Took me some time to figure out how to get the setup to work as Nvidia only has an executable for Uli-drivers. It works now, but not thanks to Asus!So three Asus boards all with trouble and having to look for drivers elsewhere and this ignores the three that died on me in the recent past.
Uh, aren’t ASUS and ASRock different companies? My router is running ASRock… and I have to say that all my _personal_ and _direct_ experience with ASUS has been on Linux, where they always worked mostly fine.By the way… SiS *also has a bloody captcha to download their driver* … and two click-through license agreements.
Asrock is a budget-brand that as far as I know belongs to Asus. So although they are formally two companies the mobos (probably) come out of the same factory.
Strange, especially because both mobo and BIOS really don’t seem anything near one the other :/