Those Crazy Video Driver Updates

You know, video drivers are funny things. They're incredibly important to the stability and speed of our computers, yet do this day neither ATI nor NVIDIA use Windows Update to alert me as a user that there's a driver update (with some rare exceptions on the NVIDIA site of things). Since the NVIDIA and ATI drivers come with rich control panel interfaces, with modules that tend to run at start-up, you'd think they'd have built-in update checkers. They don't, which I've always wondered about - it's a hassle to have to remember to check two Web sites for new video drivers every month. Then there's the whole installation procedure: the screen shot below shows the second of my gripes with video driver updates.

The problem? I run two monitors on my main workstation at 1920 x 1200 resolution. On the left monitor, I tend to have a bunch of icons - I use my desktop as my workbench, and like any good workbench, there are certain places that you put things. I have a folder called "Workspace" in the lower-left corner of every computer that I use, and I use FolderShare to keep the contents of that folder in sync across all my computers. I have shortcuts to folders inside the Workspace folder for things like "Active Articles", "Photos for Processing", and a few others. And because I have so much desktop space, I tend to group files for active projects together.

And what happens when I install a new graphics driver? The stupid thing resets my desktop resolution to 640 x 480 during the install, cramming all my desktop shortcuts and files together in the upper left corner. Is that really the best ATI and NVIDIA can do in 2008? Come on, there has to be a better way.

My third gripe is the way companies are including "bonus" software with driver installs now - it's one thing for Divx to pimp a browser toolbar when they're giving away a free codec, but with NVIDIA and ATI, I'm getting driver updates for a product that I paid money for. So should ATI really be offering, by default, a World of Warcraft trial? I don't mind this one quite as much because if it means their driver group can show a profit and can devote more time to better drivers, that's not a bad thing. But it shouldn't be checked off by default.

What are your video driver gripes?