Most Annoying Update Ever

Alright, this is definitely going to be filed under WTF! I so tired of this that I’m resorting to bloggerbashing a company that I until recently thought was pretty cool people. Story: I recently reformatted my machine. I got all the major stuff squared away (openoffice.org, Photofiltre, Firefox, etc) and began installing the peripherals. Backup drive, photo printer, and the rest went nice and smooth. Then comes the HP 1410 All-in-One. Insert drivers disk, connect printer, detect drivers, yada-yada. Then it asks if I want to check for software updates. And I made the mistake of hitting “yes.” It printed fine at this point, and I still (doh!) hit “yes.” That was 5 days ago. Evidently, in the year I’ve had this printer, there have been over 8 million updates put out by HP. Why? Not sure. It still prints the same. It has yet to do anything like cook dinner for me or greet me at the door when I come home. The first software update somehow whacked the registry entry for iTunes. Reinstall iTunes, restart the computer, problem solved, 7,999,999,999 updates to go. Here is where I get annoyed. Each update makes you confirm that it has been installed by clicking “OK” when the “Install Completed” window pops up. Unfortunately, I do not live at my PC and I get up to do other things sometimes. And for the past 4 days, whenever I’ve wanted to work, I’ve had to hit “OK” to close the annoying window that tells me that yet another update has completed and remind my machine every few minutes that, no, now is not a good time to restart. Not to mention that the whole update process zaps most of my available memory. Seriously, is this really necesary?? Does my printer really do anything that much cooler than it did when I bought it?? Thank you, HP, for trumping Microsoft on the most annoying update I’ve ever had to do!!