Once upon a time, installing a program or peripheral meant taking a floppy disk out of a Ziploc bag and copying it to your hard drive. Then things got ugly. Programs would ship on 40 floppies, locking you into your seat for hours and making you play disk jockey. Next in line came the lethargic 1X CD-ROM drive and the 56-kbps download. The Windows Registry helpfully added multiple reboots.

Fast optical drives, broadband, and newer Windows versions have helped a bit. But utterly unchanged are the trepidation you feel upon running setup.exe and the queasiness you get when discovering that unpleasant things are happening to your PC. Things you can't do anything about. Things like these:

More than you needed to know--and less: I don't care about precisely when the installer is "writing new Registry values." I do care about precisely what it is going to do to my system, like whether it will force the machine to run an unwanted program at every boot. Most installers tell me the former but not the latter. More missing information: Exactly when will my presence be required to answer screen prompts, and how long can I let the PC do its thing while I grab a stiff drink?

Installation overkill: Installers for peripherals like scanners and cameras often perform multipart installations. You get drivers for the device, but typically you also get programs for editing pictures or recognizing printed characters, and usually a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader so you can read the manual that the company was too cheap to print. Unless you demand a "custom" installation (and sometimes even then), you may end up with space-wasting junk you couldn't care less about.

Smart stupidity: How come installers rarely notice that I already have a copy of Acrobat Reader--one that's newer than the past-its-pull-date version on the CD? How come they keep asking me what to do about system DLLs that are older than the ones already on my hard drive?

Flaw in order: Vendors unendingly develop drivers that make you install software and plug in hardware in a particularly rigorous order. Many peripherals also include instructions warning you to respond to Windows prompts in ways that make no obvious sense--like telling the system to disregard the product you just connected. And how about messages that imply you're installing several products ("Installing standard USB doofusation hub; installing Mass Pike device") when you're actually adding just one?

Bumptious presumptions: Where do programs get off assuming that they can stuff another icon on the desktop or into the system tray without asking? Where do they get the chutzpah to declare themselves the default players for whatever file types they want to run? And where do they acquire the gall to waste cycles constantly checking for updates?

Installing a product ought to be simple. It ought to create a good first impression instead of an uneasy sense that nobody really gives a damn. And though some vendors do handle some of this stuff properly, asking your permission before rejiggering your desktop or sticking you with extra baggage, it's hard to think of one that does everything right every time. So the only good news about installing a new piece of hardware or software is that you have to do it just once.

At least until the moment you discover that the CD-ROM in the box is out-of-date and you have to download an upgrade.

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