Waiting for the Second Coming Will Probably Pay Off Faster Than Waiting for HP Printer Software to Work

I've had a love-hate relationship with HP products, over the years. I like their printers, but the price of consumables for them is prohibitive, in my opinion. HP support has been spotty, at best, for me. Sometimes, they shine, but often they're condescending to nearly the point of rudeness. It's as if I have to prove my credentials as a tech before I'm entitled to a straight answer. They do make some very desireable computers and I've bought a few. Two in this last year, as a matter of fact. And HP servers are often what I recommend for my clients because they're as reliable as refrigerators and fairly priced.

Try downloading drivers for a 3 year old laptop, though. They don't offer them. At least I've never found them and you would be hard pressed to look harder than I have. They're not real hot on supporting products outside the warranty period. It would be easy and cheap to leave them on a server somewhere, for those of us who need them. The return in customer good will would probably pay the costs. They don't do it, though.

I recently disinfected my wife's parents' computer, which was chock-full of spyware and was functioning as a spam bot. During the course of the job, we decided they needed to upgrade the OS from Windows ME to Windows 2000 Professional or XP Home. We ended up choosing W2K Pro, as licenses were already at hand, where we would have had to pay for XP, as I had no more licenses. The machine is an HP desktop with an 800 MHz Celeron CPU and I added some RAM so it's possessed of 256 MB. This is surely good enough specs to provide a machine capable of doing everything they do in a snappy manner and, indeed, I was very satisfied with the results of the upgrade and installation until I got to the printer.

The unit in question is an HP psc750 xi. It's a printer, scanner and copier all in one kind of thing. Attractive and nicely laid out, I think it would be something which added to one's work if it performed as I expect. It doesn't, though. It's a pig, when using the software HP provides with it. The installation of software from the accompanying CDs, takes up over 200 MEGABYTES on the hard drive. The sheer size of the installation is apalling! I don't care if disk space is cheap, these days. That's just too much.

The size of the installation shows immediately when the application is launched. It takes forever to open. A full ten minutes on this machine. Yes, a Celeron with it's smal cache and low internal bus speed is not the best computer. But with all other applications, it performs well enough. This one is just too big. Clicking on the "scan" button requires a several minute wait until the machine is ready to start the actual scan. If you rush it, the application locks up. You have to wait and take it slow. It's slower to open than The GIMP, for Heaven's sake! And The GIMP is a huge application with dozens of plug-ins that have to be loaded. This is just a printer driver plus a few functions.

I complained about this on the show and Peter reminded me that HP never claimed to be a software company. Darned right they aren't!

The machine itself is not slow. I hooked it up to my Linux laptop and used all it's functions via the drivers included in most current Linux distributions and it performed quite briskly. The problem is definitely the software. HP offers a "driver only" package for it. That's nearly 50 megabytes in the download and over that when installed. Other applications can be used for the interface and that helps noticeably. I wish I had a really good one and am actively looking for one. I'm sure there are some out there. Right now, they're only printing from other apps, such as Open Office, and doing all their scanning with PaperPort, with which they are not too happy.

What the world needs is good software for this sort of task and the machines we use for it. God knows HP isn't providing it.

Jack