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)

I uninstalled the MSDN Library the other day and the uninstall process, in an attempt at proving how it wasn’t prejudiced in its own software’s favour, also uninstalled the drivers for the HP printer I have.

Well it didn’t completely uninstall the drivers but it did upset XP so much that XP thought that the drivers for the HP printer were in the process of being installed and would I load the relevant HP driver setup disc. No way, as the setup disc I do have is at least 2 years old and is so decrepit it is just not worth installing. I had downloaded the basic drivers, not the buggy ‘suite’ version, about 6 months ago, but never saved them or wrote them to disc (Clot. Ed).

So what did I do? I tried downloading the full-power ‘suite’ version of HP drivers, which were about 274 meg. Jeez that’s a lot of code to print the alphabet on a piece of plain paper. Didn’t install too good, even with judicious rebooting. Seemed to think it was in the middle of an install all the time. In a rush of clarity I thought I’d download the basic driver set, which was only 26 meg, and install those drivers instead.

There were still install issues with messages displayed in the unlikeliest of places. You might be able to tell that I wasn’t approaching the setting up of the HP printer with a sufficient amount of earnestness and you’re right. I was getting a bit fed up with this install as I have been through these loops numerous times before and was a bit apathetic about it. So in a further rush of clarity I decided to run add/remove programs to see what HP applications were installed and see what could be gotten rid of before a great big fat reboot and another attempt at an install. 

There were about 4 or 5 HP applications installed, which must have been printer specific as I’m pretty sure I don’t have any other HP bloat software installed. Most of the HP apps were hundreds of megabytes in size and were probably incompatible with each other, hence the plethora of confusing messages displayed. Decided to uninstall the lot and free up some hard drive space if nothing else. I’ll try reinstalling the basic driver set later, which will probably work. 

Router playing up

Our wireless router has been playing up a bit recently. Unless you are constantly downloading files or browsing you wouldn’t always notice that the connection is occasionally being lost, and this has got nothing to do with Vista randomly deciding that it is time to disconnect from the Internet. But when listening to the Internet radio, any drop-out is immediately apparent. 

I work from home at least one day a week and if the router went terminally bad I realised I have no contingency plan. No doubt BT would fix the problem but it would take several days at least and the thought of no Internet connection doesn’t bear thinking about. The obvious answer is to get a spare wireless router and make sure it actually works.