Sometimes I wish the Rage thread were still open...
Because goddamn HP printers make me want to kill something. How such byzantine software fuckery hasn't resulted in their company being firebombed by all users in the world is beyond me.
HP printers are the worst. Do you have he problem where it spontaneously locks up and needs to turned off and unplugged in order to reset it? I've had that on two different HP printers.
Basically, yes. A wifi printer that was installed a day ago stopped working on two computers it was networked to. Computer 1 I fixed the issue by the usual power cycling.
Computer #2 I spent 6 hours trying to get a print job to go out on it correctly. Windows saw it, the network saw it and yet every print job queued displayed a different behavior. Sometimes, it would print only the last page. Sometimes it would print a blank page. Sometimes it would print in landscape. Sometimes it would spool way more pages than the actual print job called for, spooling off into infinity. And sometimes the print job would just disappear out of the queue like it had completed, but no print ever came out.
But the real joy started when I began uninstalling drivers. When I tried to re-install the software using HPs installers, they would end with "File not found" "Fatal error" "Uninstalling HP applications"...only it never uninstalled anything. This basically stopped me from reinstalling the software because of registry conflicts.
So I said fuck it, I know how printers work, let me just go find the basic driver installer. Well guess what, that throws errors too upon completion, and there's no fucking trace of the .inf anywhere to be found, because HP builds horrifically bloated software that can't simply unpack a file to the right place and register it with windows.
As a last desperate resort I turned to the HP Print and Scan Doctor utility. It recommended I download the full software suite. Which I'd already done but I said fuck it, why not. It downloaded for 25 minutes before completing with "Download fail."
And as the cherry on top? The first computer it was printing from after I fixed it? A day later it stopped printing.
God damn it I hate printers, but there is a special place in hell reserved specifically for HP Product Managers and Developers.