jr conlin's ink stained banana

It's notable, that the thing that lead Richard Stallman to found the Open Source movement was the fact that he couldn't get his printer driver to work.

This afternoon, my neighbor came to me in frustrated rage because the brand new HP c4750 she was trying to set up simply wouldn't work even after three days of constantly fiddling with it. The problem, of course, was that HP (which every passing day i'm further convinced is full of individuals of great malice) do not provide the simple driver files. Instead, they require the unwitting to run their "installation wizard" which has more in common with Sauron than Gandolf. Said "wizard" would start, hit a fatal error, and then remove all the needed files before helpfully rebooting the computer. (i found the pleasant "Sending an error report" lie to be very amusing. Having worked places that offer that service, i knew damn well that no programmer would see that "error report".)

Naturally, the solution was to start the "wizard" and then kill him with the digital crowbar that is Task Manager's "Kill Process". Once done, you look through various temporary directories for recent new directories and effectively loot the corpse looking for the actual driver files. Sure enough, two hours later, she had a working printer/scanner.

Of course, the "wireless" feature is broken by design because there's no way to change the printer's wireless settings, except for using the now bludgeoned corpse of a wizard, which, even reanimated, is about as helpful as it was deceased.

i provided a friendly reminder to my very nice neighbor that a cheap printer isn't always a "bargain", and that even though she is no longer able to return the immensely defective device, she might be able to fend it off on some sucker via ebay.

Still, as i left mumbling epithets toward Palo Alto, and increasingly aware that the former CEO of the company that produces the most costly substance on earth is now running for senate, i wondered if perhaps HP is doing more to promote Open Source than any other organization on the planet.

Really, what it comes down to is that if you want the least number of headaches, you get a printer that is network ready and use something like "LPR" to connect to it. If you can't, bring it back because it's obviously broken and defective.

i'd recommend getting an Epson.