Yeah, even I get miffed and frustrated when it comes to dealing with computers and the galactic stupidity of the computer industry.
A few weeks back my HP Color LaserJet printer decided to no longer obtain an IP address from my router. It was off the network.
The printer had worked flawlessly before that point in time. Then, as these things happen, it suddenly stopped working.
Looking on the Internet, I found that others have had this sudden stupidity problem with the Color LaserJet. Their solution was to assign the printer a manual IP address.
I tried that. Didn’t work.
So I let the printer be . . . until I needed to print something in color.
After weeks of sitting there, the printer still won’t talk with the network. So I decided to just hook it up manually via a USB cable. That’s a solution, but it’s not an ideal solution as it’s better in my office to have printers directly connected to the network than to a specific computer that may be off or hibernating.
The HP web site isn’t charming. There is no download link for Windows 7 HP drivers for the Color LaserJet. It looks like there are download links, but they’re not there. If you click on, you’re simply taken back to the main Search For Your Driver page. So after some tedious agony, I decided to download the Windows Vista drivers instead.
The installation bombed at first. HP reminded me to be logged in as an “Administrator” account. Of course I am an Administrator, but the inane Install program didn’t pick that up. So I tried again. And again.
Eventually the Install program ran. I was quite surprised that it was going so well, but I was stupid to let down my guard.
The installation took so long that the printer went into sleep mode. So the installation failed. I don’t see how that could have happened. Can’t the idiots at HP program the printer so that it won’t fall asleep when you’re installing it?
I tried running the Install program again. I followed the steps onscreen. But the Install program wouldn’t recognize that I had connected the USB cable after it told me to do so. It just sat there.
Now I’m going to have a wonderful day speaking with some drone from India who doesn’t know squat about my printer, barely speaks intelligible English, but will recite for me all the garbage from their troubleshooting book. I’ll have to put up with that for at least 45 minutes until I finally get an American tech, who may actually tell me how to fix their stupid, piece-of-crap, printer.
It could be a dodgy update to the driver that stopped it working. If it was working fine then stopped. That happened to a graphics card of mine it up dated via the Windows update manager in Windows 7 and I had loads of problems with it. So I put back on an older driver and it worked again. That’s one problem with Windows 7 it updates in the background, most of the time it’s fine but occasionally it either won’t update properly or the driver was written poorly. Then you have to look through the update history trying to figure out which one is causing the trouble. But it doesn’t help that the HP site is not helpful unlike the ATI site.
Comment by chiefnoobie — December 4, 2010 @ 6:52 am
It’s not an update. The printer is sitting free and clear on the network. I doubt that it’s programmed to download and install its own updates, which would be difficult to do because it’s also turned off most of the time.
I was too busy to phone support yesterday. If I have time, I’ll do it on Monday.
Comment by admin — December 4, 2010 @ 8:29 am
yeah you had better make sure you have a large chunk of free time if you are going to phone up a support line!
Comment by chiefnoobie — December 4, 2010 @ 9:02 am