I bought a HP F4100 Deskjet printer the other day and it was cheap. Not only that but it was very noisy, slow to start, had terrible problems feeding paper through the rollers and the driver/software were hopeless.

When I installed the drivers and software it did check the HP site to see if there were any software updates to download. There wasn’t. Very soon after using it it displayed various warning messages that it was time to get ripped off some full cartridges.

While I was checking that, I opened the cover to check the cartridges were in place correctly, they were, and closed the cover. When I next tried printing something a different print window was displayed asking me which device did I want to print to.

Eh. What happened to the F4100 being the default printer. I checked the printers in Control Panel and Vista was convinced that the door (cover) was still open, and therefore the printer was unusable.

Turned the printer on and off a few times and the printers lights didn’t signal any problem, it appeared to be ready to print. Not from where Vista was sitting it wasn’t. Vista still had the printer with a status of the door (cover) being open, and therefore the printer was unusable. Obviously no signal was being sent from the printer back to Vista telling it the new OK status.

Or maybe the signal was being sent to Vista and Vista was doing its level best to ignore it in yet another attempt at confusing the hapless user i.e. a Vista bug. My money, going by previous experience, is that it’s a HP problem. Now no doubt if I Google around a bit maybe I can get the problem fixed, but it really is just such a cheap printer it’s going back to the shop and I’ll get a decent printer, and cough up whatever is necessary.

I’d love to test HP’s drivers and software as they’re always a bit flakey and you would have a lot of fun getting that stuff working OK (You couldn’t nip over and have a look at Nero as well could you? Ed).

I needed to scan some documents the other day and that isn’t possible with the basic driver set for the HP PSC 2355 printer, so I downloaded what HP called the ‘Full Feature Software/Driver’.

The file was 274.78 megabytes in size and took a full hour to download. Ran the install, which thrashed about for a bit. I now have installed an app called Image Transfer. Clicked on that and nothing happened. It just didn’t do anything at all. The printer still prints OK so the basic driver set hasn’t been corrupted. I’m sure I could and will sooner or later, Google for this for half an hour and then spend another 30 minutes doing ‘puters. I’d love to see the test scripts and results for when HP tested these drivers.

A side effect of the hour long download is that the wireless Internet radio didn’t work too good, the sound kept dropping out. So if you spend much time downloading huge files, like films, via Bittorrent then an Internet radio is not much use, but for the rest of us they’re great.

Internet Explorer 7 Done 

I was downloading a car route plan, which included a map of the route. The drive instructions were downloaded immediately but it took a further 20 seconds for the map to be downloaded. As soon as the instructions were downloaded, and whilst I was waiting for the map to be downloaded, IE7 said in the bottom left hand corner ‘Done’, even though the page was still being downloaded. Also the green bar to the right was scrolling along from left to right signifying that it was still loading. So why does the status say ‘Done’. That sort of inconsistency confuses people and I bet it continues to exist for a few years before that ‘feature’ is fixed.

Wordpress won’t delete

I did ask Wordpress the other day to delete my old blog, but the ’suspended’ page is still being displayed. Got a feeling that’s going to be left there for a long time.

Quote of the day

‘Nothing you can’t spell will ever work’ Will Rogers (1879-1935)