Posts tagged as "software"

Sometimes the Hardware is Willing but the Software is Weak

I've had an HP DeskJet F-something-or-other for a couple of years now. It's a small grey thing, around the size of a shoe box that prints, scans and photocopies. At least that's what it said in the brochure and on HP's web site. It used to sit plugged into the USB port on my AirPort Express for easy wireless printing. Not that it actually printed mind you. I viewed this piece of hardware's role in life as rendering documents from one of the Macs we have in the house, in full colour or black and while, onto sheets of A4 paper.The DeskJet had other ideas.It viewed its role in life as a source of revenue for HP to get me to keep buying ever more expensive replacement inkjet refills, by the cunning ruse of reporting the cartridge was empty when it was brand new, by refusing to print colour or black and white consistently and in the end, by just refusing to print, unless it was using invisible ink that it secreted somewhere in that grey shoe box.The scanner was OK though but the photocopier functionality was somewhat hampered by the lack of being actually able to print what had just been scanned. The printer continued to not endear itself by refusing to be installed on my faithful and ageing PowerPC based iBook G4 running Leopard. Intel MacBook Pros running Leopard and Snow Leopard seemed to be fine but the iBook insisted the printer was actually another model entirely and just sulked.So based on the premise that we wanted to print far more often than we wanted to scan, the HP DeskJet F-whatever-the-model-number-is has been retired and replaced with a gleaming, black, colour laser printer from Samsung. It's a CLP-315W for those of you who like model numbers.