Saturday, May 21, 2005

HP: Why Not Just Zip Your Printer Driver?

Damn, three large downloads, one hour of wasted time, and my HP Deskjet 3820 still doesn't print thanks to the geniuses at HP who cannot even provide a working driver installation package. The first setup wizard crashes after 10% of unpacking, the second one won't find a DLL function entry point and terminates, and the third one displays an empty frame on my desktop, and that's about it. Go and throw your files and your driver.ini into a zip, would you? I don't need your flashy installer anyway.

Update: Cool, one of the crashing HP driver setup wizards did exactly that - left the driver files laying around in it's working directory. That's what I call customer service. Thank you, HP!

Reminder: Always keep driver CD.