This is very similar to a question I asked last week about the exact same thing ...just not specific to this OP's problems.
The answer reigned down that it is primarily preference. One of our Rockstars offered that the Zips often fail to self-execute. It is my experience that some of these will extract and then allow the user to hunt for the driver setup file by it's number (as a safeguard against accidental installation??). I'm sure our favorite OEM has a perfectly good and beneficial reason for distributing driver setup files this way, I just haven't been able to figure out why, when I do I'm going to submit my resume to Dell. HAHA! The .exe's don't have that problem, which stands to reason.
I don't necessarily see the logic in dual distribution since 10-20mb isn't the kind of real estate it was 15 years ago when you had bragging rights if you were in possession of a 40GB HDD. Since I don't make all the decisions about support software distribution (okay none of them if you want to get technical about it) I don't entirely understand why it's done this way. BUT I think if I were making all the important decisions that dictate how support for MY equipment was distributed. I would either A) Only offer .zip on my site and ensure they were properly written to auto-execute after unpackaging or B) Only offer the exe....so the extra step of writing "EXECUTE" in the self extractor didn't have to be entrusted to one of the numerous project managers that oversee the highly educated and trained, trusted progarmmers I kept on payroll.
Philip_Yip
9 Legend
•
16.1K Posts
1
June 15th, 2014 02:00
They are the same driver just bundled differently.
The first one is in "hard drive format" and the second one as "update package for Microsoft Windows". I prefer the hard drive format.
When installing drivers make sure they extract and install and not only extract. See the video at the bottom here for example:
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/downloading-drivers-checking-hardware-ids-and-downloading-and-installing-dell-system-drivers-in-the-correct-order/driver-installation/
N7U
615 Posts
1
June 15th, 2014 04:00
Phillip,
This is very similar to a question I asked last week about the exact same thing ...just not specific to this OP's problems.
The answer reigned down that it is primarily preference. One of our Rockstars offered that the Zips often fail to self-execute. It is my experience that some of these will extract and then allow the user to hunt for the driver setup file by it's number (as a safeguard against accidental installation??). I'm sure our favorite OEM has a perfectly good and beneficial reason for distributing driver setup files this way, I just haven't been able to figure out why, when I do I'm going to submit my resume to Dell. HAHA! The .exe's don't have that problem, which stands to reason.
I don't necessarily see the logic in dual distribution since 10-20mb isn't the kind of real estate it was 15 years ago when you had bragging rights if you were in possession of a 40GB HDD. Since I don't make all the decisions about support software distribution (okay none of them if you want to get technical about it) I don't entirely understand why it's done this way. BUT I think if I were making all the important decisions that dictate how support for MY equipment was distributed. I would either A) Only offer .zip on my site and ensure they were properly written to auto-execute after unpackaging or B) Only offer the exe....so the extra step of writing "EXECUTE" in the self extractor didn't have to be entrusted to one of the numerous project managers that oversee the highly educated and trained, trusted progarmmers I kept on payroll.