Mike Kirby's Journey of Enlightenment

I’ve been doing some work for a small not for profit office locally while I continue to look for employment or contracts.  I’ve done an upgrade of all the workstations to a minimum of 4GB of RAM, Office 2007 SB and either Windows XP SP3 or Vista Home Premium (most of their equipment is donated).

 

During the upgrades we ended up replacing one of the machines and rolling it down to a lesser used area that was running Windows 2000 on very old hardware.  As soon as the machine was connected to the shared printer on the Windows XP machine beside it, both machines started crashing.  Strange as the old Windows 2000 machine printed to the same printer, hosted the same way with no issues.  My immediate reaction was it was likely related to the fact that it was a GDI/ host based printer and that perhaps the issue was due to drivers.

 

I went to HP’s site and there were quite recent drivers available.  I had the option of a Full or minimal driver set.  After some initial research on the issue, may people appeared to be having issues with drivers and sharing.  Most of the problems seemed to be related to registry errors and two services that the drivers installed (possibly related to the "all in one" features).  HP’s site also had driver "removal tools", communication error hotfixes and registry fixes.  I wasted at least a few hours going through some of the explained solutions I found online before I recommened to the client would do better to spend their money on a network based printer as some very good one’s with more capabilities are available for less than $200.

 

We ended up getting another HP (somewhat against my better judgement due to the issues that I had been having with HP drivers with the older printer) a Officejet 6500 wireless all-in-one.  Luckily it was somewhat of a cinche to install and configure and was even automaticially detected by my own Window 7 64 machine without loading a single driver.

 

As I was leaving, I asked the director if he would mind if I took the old printer to "play with" as I had read that hosting from Linux worked fine.  I have a Ubuntu 10.04 machine at home and was curious if I could make it work (on my own time without billing the client).  To my amazement, the printer was automatically detected and drivers installed for printing and scanning!  Not only that but my existing CUPS/ internet printing worked immediately as well.  Installing the "HP Deskjet F4200 Series" driver on Windows 7 was very painless.  On Vista the printer was not automatically showing a compatible driver though and I was EXTREMELY reluctant to install the HP drivers on my main computer at home.

 

I did some more research and found that many people had success using the HP Deskjet 990C driver provided with Windows Vista.  I setup my machine with this and the printer is working amazingly.

 

Bottomline.  I love HP hardware and technology but absolutely HATE their drivers.  When I was a network administrator I found that I needed to standardize on HP Laserjet 4 drivers across our network due to the horrible drivers that would crash our Citrix servers.  The latest, greatest drivers provided with all their printers would not only use huge amounts of RAM for each session but had memory leaks and crashes (nothing tests software better than putting 100+ sessions on one machine in real life use!!!)