LabVIEW
Is it possible to use NI hardware without permanently infecting my PC
I was just trying to install the NI hardware support package so that my NI 9219 could be used with Matlab.
Now there's a bunch of popups in the task bar and these process constantly running in the background :
This is worse than most malwares, this is ridiculous.
If I am using most other data acquisition boards, I just need to install one driver and it won't be constantly running in the background and won't show up at startup.
To start with, you're being dramatic.
Keep in mind that NI hardware and software is intended to be useful to scientists and engineers and not just computer scientists and computer engineers. That means a lot of automated tooling to provide suggested actions when new local hardware is detected, automate detection and interaction with network devices, and a whole host of other functionality. Try developing your own driver and configuration stacks that are backwards compatible with 20+ years of hardware connected via ethernet and you'll wind up with a lot of the same tooling unless you eliminate usability requirements for a large portion of your user base. NI isn't developing their software stack for themselves or a restricted group of customers. NI has supplied tooling and integration for a software environment they aren't in control of. They need to make sure 99% of use-cases will be covered with a single install. For every one of you there would be 9 others asking why they need to pick and choose individual drivers from a dizzying list.
As ridiculous as it may seem (and certainly can be at points) calling it worse than malware is perhaps maybe just a tad bit whiny. The Matlab DAQmx support lists a mind boggling set of hardware:
This means you get all the automated tooling for local device detection, configuration, and firmware deployment, all the tooling for network device detection, firmware management, and software deployment, and all the myriad of additional support tooling and abstraction layers.
