Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Apple & HP
This is probably more a tirade against HP (Hewlett Packard) than Apple, but Apple isn't completely blameless. We have a HP PSC 1500 all-in-one printer hooked up to our newish iMac. it used to be hooked up to the WinXP machine a couple of months ago. One thing I hated about the HP was the gargantuan pile of software that got installed when you installed the supplied driver software.
After running the WinXP installation, HP crap was everywhere - in the startup menu, checking online, running hither and yon all over the Windows expanse. I really-really hated it and regretted ever buying HP. My previous Epson was much more software friendly when running (granted it's a few years older, so Epson may now be just as bad). And of course something simple like checking ink cartridge levels was buried in the system driver routine (I think anyway).
So when I got the Apple and hooked up the printer I was gladened that it seemed to print just fine with what Apple came with. That was OK until I tried to scan with the all-in-one. No matter what I tried the iMac just couldn't see the scanner. So I went to the HP site and downloaded the Mac 10.4 driver - all 170MB or so. I installed it and guess what - it couldn't find the printer. Now I had gobs and gobs of HP crap on my iMac and still couldn't scan. And you know what? Now when I tried to print from Firefox, Firefox would just close - boom, no warning, no nothing - just gone.
I looked for HP driver updates - none, and tried to uninstall and reinstall the existing drivers; I looked for Firefox updates and installed the latest, I plugged and unplugged and booted and rebooted, all to no avail. Finally in desparation I dragged the Mac OSX install disks out and looked on them for printer stuff. I uninstalled the HP stuff - leaving god knows how much HP detrius on my iMac and rebooted and installed the .pkg HP driver stuff from Apple and rebooted again.
Final result is that while I still can't scan and now have little HP bits scattered about, I can at least print from Firefox again.
