[BC] My troublesome HP Officejet 7000

[Jeff Glass]

In a message dated 2/25/2010 8:08:49 AM Central Standard Time, broadcast-request at radiolists.net writes:

>I'm confused.

>You have a problem with Windoz 2000 computers, and I presume no others.

>You write;

>> Thanks for nothing, Microsoft.

>THEN, even though the printer is working fine on other OSs, you write:

>> Last HP product I ever buy.

>I have to admit, I keep computers, and even other things like cars, 
>going much longer than I should, but you have to realize two things:  
>First is that the OS, a very old OS, seems to be the real problem.  If 
>not, you would be able to remove the icons, and possibly go back to 
>where you were before.

>I don't think you have a printer problem, but an OS problem.  Why not 
>try moving to XP on one of the problem machines?

Chip,

I am forced to leave some things out when I post here, to avoid writing a Doctor's Thesis about the particular topic at hand.

If you are OK with pissing your time away for three days, then I can see why you are confused. It usually takes me about 20 minutes to get a printer going on a shared basis over the network.

I tried running the 7000 from an XP computer early on. The printer dialog box took about a minute to load, rather than two minutes when the printer was shared from the Office 2000 machine.

HP tech support sucks gutter muck. Totally clueless, totally unreliable.

Microsoft pointed me to a hotfix for my Win2000 problems, only to find that Micro$oft took away the hotfix. Fortunately, after wasting hours of more time, I worked around the issue myself. So thanks to Microsoft for wasting more of my time, given that I have more time than I know what to do with - NOT.

This will be the last HP product I ever buy. Ten years ago, their crap was an uphill struggle to get working. It's the same ay today apparently. HP has made no apparent progress, so they have lost a customer.

There is no excuse for it taking this long (several days) to get a printer up and running, and there is no excuse for customer support not finding the problem, which was really quite simple in retrospect.

What I learned about the 7000 is, if you want to share it on the network among client computers, the printer must be shared using the cat5 connection. It appears that it is not practical to share the printer on a local machine. In this day and age, media connections on HP printers at least are not options; If you want to share the printer, it must be on the network directly. The USB connection is there for using the printer on a dedicated machine. Maybe that's the way all printers are these days; I honestly don't know.

So Chip, I don't think I'm obligated to now be a happy camper because after this ordeal, I now have a functional printer. I'm satisfied to a point. BTW the printer was supposed to be Win XP and Win 2k compatible. It is, and it isn't. When you run the HP bloatware disk, it comes up with a snottygram saying that you're using an unsupported O/S. The customer support people were incompetent, period.

My tolerance level is such that I'm not OK with spending this kind of effort when just a little bit of savvy on the part of tech support would have saved me a couple days. Tech support is what separates the men from the boys when it comes to any 21st century electronics device.

Chip, maybe this is the kind of thing that you enjoy solving. And that's great if you are.

Jeff Glass