Updates: Are all of them really necessary?

You've noticed, I'm sure, that over the past couple of years or so, there's been a great proliferation of more frequent updates to a lot of the stuff on our computers which perhaps doesn't need to be tweaked and twiddled with nearly so often. Is this the programmers' version of a 'Make Work Project'? I think so.

Today, for example, I turned on this PC and immediately got a pop-up informing that a newer driver for my Graphics card was available from nVidia. Bless their pointed little ears. My Device Manager in Control Panel says that according to Windows, the graphics card driver is the latest available already. But I thought
'what the hell?' and decided to see what nVidia had on tap. I never did really find out, because after it downloaded a hundred and some megabytes of something into my files, it started installing a couple of drivers, but then it stalled about halfway through all that, and sat there doing nothing, and keeping me from doing anything until I finally said, "To hell with this!" and dumped it.

My graphics are still working just fine, and Windows still says everything is up to date and no better driver is available. Go figure. A lot of these driver updates for Graphics cards are tweaks to parts that are used for 'overclocking' by gamers, and I'm not a gamer, so those aren't any use to me anyway, so why clutter up my system with a lot of junk I would never use?

If the card makers like nVidia wanted to do us a real favor, they'd plainly mark these gamer tweaks as such, so we could opt to skip them, instead of them building those into the driver package as if an essential part, which they aren't.
There's a lot of useless crap being pawned off on us under the guise of updates,
and it's not just video card makers who are guilty of that - the browser guys like Mozilla's Firefox gang are also right in there. Lately, their 'improvements' are improving the original to the point of virtual uselessness. They are rapidly approaching a point where they will have to scrap the whole thing, and start from scratch all over again from Square One. And they ought to get at it. Their biggest mistakes lately involve jumping to conclusions on what's wanted or needed by their users. We're basically an unsophisticated bunch, and if it works,
we don't see any reason to fix it. Not even if means you don't get that next raise for screwing up the cooking. (And I cleaned that up a lot!)