Day three

[altivo]

Finishing hem of rug on the big loom in preparation for a new warp. Distracted by Gary's problems with his new laptop. Getting it to connect to a network printer was much more of an issue than it should have been. Seems that Windows 7 will only load drivers for newer HP deskjet printers from Windows Update. You can't install them from CD or by download from HP's web site. Since the printer in question is attached by USB to a Windows XP workstation and shared over Windows networking, there is no way to get the driver installed.

The only answer that worked was to unplug the USB cable from the XP machine and plug it directly into the laptop. This gets the driver downloaded from Windows Update. Then you have to manually edit the printer configuration to connect it to a network port. Only after that can you unplug the USB cable (otherwise the printer driver seems to erase itself.) This is incredibly boneheaded, HP and Microsoft. You are saying that someone who has no internet connection cannot install a new HP deskjet printer at all. Apparently it isn't allowed. You also appear to be saying that you "forgot" that printing over a small local network has always been supported by Windows. Well, it does work once you figure it out, but absolutely nothing on the HP support site tells you how to do this. All they do is tell you how to install the printer as a local USB device, assuming of course that you have an internet connection to download the driver. No internet? OK, then, no driver, no printer for you.

Red went to obedience class tonight. I took a bunch of photos but haven't offloaded them yet. I didn't want to use the flash, so they may be blurry. They looked OK on the camera's viewscreen though.

Tomorrow the warping can begin. And it's supposed to snow, possibly 3 inches or more, so it will be a good day to stay home and get it done.

Comments

[deffox]

I would blame HP a lot more than Microsoft. Though I have done a similar procedure to install print drivers for printing to a computer with an older operating system.

Our current HP office all-in-one is a total pain with its software. The first insult is the user agreement, whose terms include nonsense like the driver can only be installed on a single computer for a networked office printer. The install is huge and buggy. Plus the software insists on being memory resident and causes my computer to randomly drop to desktop when inside a game. While I hope to get several years out of the current printer, next time we go with a non-HP brand.

[altivo]

In my experience, HP "all-in-one" printers are crap. We burned through four of them in a year. They kept replacing them under the warranty, even upgraded to a more expensive model when the first one became "unavailable" but none of them lasted very long. Junk made of plastic and string, lousy drivers as you say, support only from India. Total crap.

I blame Microsoft equally for the driver install idiocy. They are trying to get complete control of hardware drivers so they can deny installation to anyone whose Windows installation looks illicit to them. What really galls me though is the "internet only" nature of the installation. Internet availability even in the US is NOT a given. In many areas poor quality dialup is all you can get. Some of us do NOT feel a need to be always connected, and do have machines that are deliberately isolated from the net. MS treats you as a pariah when you do that. They want their nose and sneaky fingers in everything you do.

[hrrunka]

I'm led to believe there were problems over here at a large government communications establishment back when Microsoft first decided that every new Windows installation would require Net connectivity in order to validate itself before it would deign to run...

[altivo]

They did that with XP but only to individual installations. I use a "corporate" installation with a multi-user key at work and that appears not to validate over the net.

Have they changed now so that every installation has to validate with mother? Just one more reason to switch to Linux, I'd say.

[hrrunka]

This was a while back; could have been early in XP's life, I guess? Might even have been the reason corporate keys don't call home now?

[altivo]

Could be. That's a level of knowledge about Microsoft and their products that I don't have. I do think that more and more they are tending to do stuff to suit themselves and their convenience or profit, rather than to meet the needs of their customers. Of course, Apple has always done that, so it's certainly not unique to Microsoft.