One trend happening in technology over the past three years or so is bloated printer software. By bloated, I mean printer installations that require nearly one gigabyte (yes almost 1000 megabytes) of hard drive space! Call me old or nostalgic, but I miss the days where printers could be installed from a floppy disk and took less than three minutes ton install. The worst offender today seems to be HP. Their popular all-in-one printers can take up to thirty minutes to install on a NEW computer and even longer on old computers. And after spending all that time, it may still not work correctly!
Try and install a newer printer on an older Windows 98 or Me computer, and you are really asking for trouble. Today, I spent nearly two hours troubleshooting a HP All-in-one installation on a Windows Me machine and still didn't get it totally functional. My wrath on bloated software started with security software (I'm talking to Norton and McAfee) a few years ago, but now I'm breaking my silence on the printer industry. Not only are their ink cartridges causing some citizens to decide between dinner and printing their digital photos, but their impact on our hard drives and system resources is way out of hand. I would like to start a grass roots back lash against the printer industry and express our disgust in long, inefficient installation processes and software that runs like molasses in January.
Do you agree or do you think I'm just full of hot air on this subject? Let me know by leaving your comments below.
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I agree! I recently installed a next-to-bottom-of-the-line HP printer on a Windows 2000 machine. HP “recommended” I install the full software. I fell for it and it took about 45 minutes.
Then I deleted all the fluffy photosmart stuff. The computer booted faster and the printer works just fine. I should have gone for the custom install.
Harold in Cedaredge
Rick, agreed. I installed an HP all-in-one recently and my Windoz XP now takes forever to boot up. What can I disable in “StartUp” that will speed things up? Also, I have 54 processes running, Yikes! Please help ( I think I recently heard you say that more than 24 was unacceptable).
Best, Bill
I agree also. I still like the old Dot Matrix printer I had many years ago until it got sick !!
Side issue. New cars !! I recently bought a used 2006 minivan and got the users manual with it ! WOW !! Over 510 pages !! About 87 pages of things you should know before starting !!!
Modern technology !! Printers aren’t the only problem !
George
I am trying to print out some photos from Christmas that were sent by someone
as a JPG on my HP 6210xi all in one printer. I changed to printer cartredge to a 99 which is what it called for. It has two cartredges in it. I did the install printer cartredge check with paper looked good. When I try to print out on 5×7 from the JPG site in the document section. It goes thru all this stuff. You go into printer preferences and do all that, the print looks like crap. Not much color to it. I have Kodac easy share on my computer and the pictures look good
from there. Why are the pictures so crappy with color, mostly yellow and brown.
Preferences don’t work correct either. Can someone help me, or do I need to go to the Chat room at HP and wait until they can try and figure it out. Is the printer not the right way to go when printing out photos.