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this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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I built a PC for my little sister in 2007. She was starting college and didn't have a computer. It totaled 2805 and some change, custom built through Antares Digital (When you know, you Lili). These were all top of the line components (Asus M2N32-WS PRO, Amd athlon64 X2 AM2 5200, Corsair Memory). Not a cheapy system in its day.
Three nights before I was to deliver it to her, I completed all of the setup, had all the software ready to go, even setting up a custom theme for her (We were both metalheads). My folks said that she would need a printer/fax/copy/scanner as well, so last minute, I ended up buying an HP 5610 at target for 192 dollars.
The HP instructions didn't say that if you connected the cable between the printer and the PC before you had installed the drivers, the printer would not mount as a device. In fact, it would never connect to that PC ever again. Apparently, it ruined the registry until you reformatted and reinstalled the OS.
To be fair, the manual did say to install the drivers first, then the cable, but this was not the norm back then and they didn't really emphasize it in any way, nor did it mention that you were about to be FITA big time. Had to scramble to completely reformat the drive, reinstall all the software... Essentially, starting over from a blank slate and getting done in 2 days for delivery to her dorm on move in day. It did connect second time around.
I wrote them an angry letter regarding the poor deployment, but of course I never heard back from them. Never bought another HP for myself or anyone else ever again. I go out of my way to encourage people to not buy anything from HP. If I happen to be somewhere and see someone looking at an HP printer, I'll just approach them, introduce myself, and tell them my story to discourage them from buying it.
How do they manage to fuck something up so royally? They clearly knew it was a problem, as they outlined it in their manual. But there's no way it was cheaper to deal with all the angry support calls and lost customer confidence than to just add some code to the driver installer that fixes the registry settings...
If this happened to me, I wouldn't reinstall my operating system, I would tell their support technician to fuck off and go buy a printer from a different company.
Or even just putting a piece of paper on top of the printer that says, "STOP!! INSTALL THE DRIVERS BEFORE PLUGGING THE PRINTER INTO THE PC"
Surely HP could spend $0.000125 out of their billions of dollars to spare a piece of paper to serve that purpose.
I mean >15% of people will still fuck this up, but at that point, you've done all you can.
Even the leaflet is just a shitty bandaid. What if someone picked up a printer used and it didn't include the leaflet.
It's outright unacceptable to ship a consumer product that so easily bricks itself like this.
That's a good point actually. I agree, the whole thing is just bananas. HP is a zombie tech company at this point though. You know that graphic that illustrates the product life cycle? HP products are somewhere down in the subway station on that graph
As somebody that's been working on computer hardware since the early-to-mid 90s, installing the drivers before connecting the printer was the norm. It was actually the norm for most peripherals. Just be glad you didn't have to do manual irq assignment. Hell, that is probabaly the issue, is that the driver installer borked the irq assignment when the device already had a handshake agreement with the hardware.
I digress though, this shouldn't have been the pattern for a modern printer in 2007, when PnP had been standard for several years at that point.
I still have a early 2000s (I think that's the era anyway) LaserJet 2200dn and it's done nothing of that sort, even on my spare actual Windows XP laptop. Insanity that their more consumer brand printers had those problems by '07
Don't take this as a defense of HP... but it's a known behavior of Windows where once it associates a device with some driver, like the default ones which didn't work for that printer, it won't try to search for new drivers again... until the device is removed from the system.
There are several ways of doing that, this is a modern writeup:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3322513/how-to-reduce-windows-driver-bloat-remove-outdated-drivers.html
Back in the day, there were several different ways:
You didn't need to reinstall.