Tonight I wanted to print a mailing label for something I sold on Ebay. I didn’t have the printer driver installed for our HP6980, so I went looking for it.
I found it and installed it. It made me reboot and then did some more stuff after rebooting. But what it didn’t do, apparently, is install a printer such that I could print from applications.
So then, I went looking some more, and found that HP has a network printer wizard. Great! Downloaded and ran that, and it went off on an endless loop looking for drivers. Oh, and it mis-identified my 6980 as an ‘all in one’ printer, when in fact it is just a printer.
Finally, I tracked down the actual driver INF file in c:\program files\hewlett packard and the printer wizard was able to finish installing the printer.
But all that bullshit took me 90 minutes I’ll never get back, and I shudder to think what someone who doesn’t hack on computers for a living would do faced with all that Fail.
And to top that off, HP printer drivers install a shitload of resident programs and such, and sometimes those programs go haywire.
Why can’t they just WRITE A DRIVER that satisfies the OS requirements, and INSTALL IT SIMPLY with clear feedback to the end user about what it’s doing? They’re on the right track with their Network Printer Wizard but that software doesn’t actually work right, exactly.
HP used to be one of the premiere computer companies in the world. How the mighty have fallen! Maybe if they’d only given Carly Fiorina a half bazillion dollars to run the company into the ground instead of a round bazillion, they’d be able to hire some engineers that can write a fucking printer driver correctly.
