Bad software design
It's amazing how bad software design can make your day very unproductive. I've had to re-install a certain software product, that uses a certain installer. This had to be done on a VM that was running out of space, on a physical drive that in itself had little space (sure, hard drives are cheap nowadays, but that's beside the point) I started out by expanding the VM disk as much as I could. Since I only had a system drive, I couldn't allocate the new size in Windows, so I had to create a second partition to install the software on it. I had allocated 4GB of extra space. The software I needed only takes up 1.2 GB so I thought that would be more than enough, right?
Nope, not with this installer. First off, the package itself was around 800 MB, so I had to place that on the drive. This left me with 3.2 GB. Then it indicates to me that it requires 2GB temporary space. 2GB! That is not a joke. This would leave me with 1.2 GB. The options I picked, according to the software would take up another 1.8 GB. According to the maths, I would be left without sufficient space. In fact the installer itself indicated that by a really long list of bytes with a nice negative sign in front of it.
I had two choices, either continue and risk it, or try and expand the disk even more. Considering I had already spent enough time (spent? That should be lost) on this, I decided to risk it. Starts to churn away and after about 1 hour, I start to get messages from Windows saying Drive C is low on space? Drive C? Huh? I thought I was using Drive E? Wrong again! With this installer, even if you specifically point to drive E, it will still make use of Drive C. Fortunately, and despite leaving my system disk with 50 MB of space, I managed to get the thing installed, removed all temporary files and was back up to 1.2 GB on my system drive.
So what the hell is the point of this post? Apart from being a general purpose rant, I find it amazing how something can be designed like this. I mean come on, 4GB to install something that takes up 1.1GB (yes it got that wrong too, it didn't really require 1.8GB)?
Did I forget to mention that it informs you of the free space on your drive BEFORE it allows you to actually pick the drive you want to install it on? That is, first screen says "Hey you have -1.304.4343.545.323.45 bytes remaining on Drive C with the options you picked". Two steps later, you can then indicate you want to install it on Drive E. Mind you, could be worse...the wizard could just not let you continue if you only had minus a gazillion bytes remaining.