i wrote a program which uses the microsoft speech sdk. The program runs nativly on windows XP because the sapi engine is built in. But i want to put in the readme how users with older versions of windows can still use my program. i looked around forever for information and finally came back to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&displaylang=en
i see the huge size of the redistributable engine, and then the fact that it isnt an installer just an module to build into an msi which means the program id be distributing would be way over 100 megs. So thats got me wondering, would it be a better idea just to tell everyone who doesnt have xp to just download the sdk? its like 70megs, an installer, (or at least it was when i got it) and it has the engine, and extra voices and the various files for development which would sit unused really.. but my main motivation is that it is an installer that i can just link people to, rather than distributing myself, what do you think are there any other methods that might be better? is anything wrong with this thinking im having?

Well it all depends on how much your users know about computers. If they are semi-advanced users then simply give the link, if you have users that don't know how to use a file browser (> 50% of population) then you'd better do something else.

whoa how'd it grow that big ?
last time i checked the sapi distributable was about 10 megs or so

Kenny, consider this: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/