The MFC is a all-in-one and not a bare printer. Thus it has a TCP/IP Print Provider Port,
TWAIN software and fax interface and none is "crapware". It is light on resources as
compared to HP which is heavy on resources and highly OS intrusive.
A bare printer driver is a few hundred kilobytes. Let's be generous
and call it a megabyte. A TWAIN driver is around the same. The
TCP/IP stuff is by and large leveraging existing Windows facilities.
So we're talking about a couple of megabytes on disk. Not 80Mb of
memory resident bloat.
What's the rest of it? Well, Scansoft Paperport is one thing,
which for some reason loads itself in the background permanently
and provides fairly second-rate scanner support - even MS Office
Document Imaging is preferable. The other main thing is the "Brother
Control Center", whose primary purpose appears to be to grab keyboard
focus at random times (usually when you're not even using the
printer) to tell you that you are _not_ running out of ink.
I have setup numerous Brother MFC all-in-one devices and they are an excellent SOHO to
small business office automation resource.
I don't dispute that, they're nice little printers if you want that
sort of thing. I wouldn't rank a light default software load as
among their attibutes though.
