Well, a post was just lost because Firefox suspiciously couldn’t connect to wordpress.

In my vanity I wondered if MS Fankiddies were performing a DoS attack on my blog.

No, it was just a glitch. Even the MS PC I’ve been working on could connect.

Now I’m in Safari.

Oh well.

There has been progress; while the scan button on the officejet won’t work, and the officejet purpose-built software doesn’t work either, the MS Office scanner utility detects there’s a scanner connected (on the officejet multifunction) and will scan from the plate.

Good.

A minor mishap with multiple installations of the same printer, and a quick delete of the offending party later, and the printer worked fine.

Even when connected to the PC via a USB hub.

Similarly, suddenly the HP laserjet 5L will now print.

It looks very like the ultimate issue was MS all along: Service Pack Two in fact (though why HP didn’t issue an update to their drivers and software is beyond me; but I’ll let it go for now).

Now I have a new quest: get the palm treo to sync with addressbook.Wish me luck.

Fucking hell, it’s still going.

I’ve just gone into the house, chatted briefly with G, the owner of the PC, hunted for a teabag while the kettle boiled, found the teabag and poured boiling water over it (in a cup no-less; no fooling this gal), and stomped back out here. We’re now installing HP Officejet 9100 series.

Nicely enough, the installer window is counting-down — like a harbinger of doom — the free disk space; presumably the PC will turn into an MED (Microsoft Explosive Device, as differentiated from a small bullet-shaped lump of cotton-wool) when the counter reaches Zero.

A great use of my precious time; think, I could be cycling home now after another ab-building Bikram Yoga session, with slightly sweaty hair but feeling energised and content — relaxed even — and even more-so because the day was over and I didn’t have to look at another sodding PC again that day.

Luxury!

Whoops.

Anyway, We’re on 22% on the installer, which leaves a honking 78% to go. It’s not helped by Norton scanning every stinking byte of the installation programmes either. Tea’s too hot to drink, so what can I do? I know, Youtube!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Z-DIAthbM&rel=1]

Okay, we’re back, in the continuing story of the HP printer and computer that could but refused because the software was shite.

When last we spoke (#131), I’d successfully uninstalled XP Sp2 and effectively rendered a large proportion of software on the computer useless.

Now I’m installing the HP printer software. It’s a 9110 officejet btw, a hulk of a beast sitting like… well, it’s the size of a bloody kennel to be honest… on the desk next to me.

And now we wait. The progress bar is… well, we’re validating, so it could take a while.

However, I am cautiously cautious, which is what one gets after four separate attempts to get the stupid thing working.

I think I’m going to get some more tea.

So here I am again at my friend’s place trying to get two HP printers to talk to a newly reinstalled Windows XP SP2 setup on — no less — an HP laptop.

I’ve tried the casual hope-it-prints-and-I-can-go-home-to-play-with-the-cat (not the pussy, which is another image entirely), but this has failed, and I’m in for the long-haul.

Okay, so job number one is to uninstall the software.

This is where things get funny; upon selecting “Add Remove Programs” I get the flashlight-of-doom. Hello?! This is a newly reformatted and reinstalled system! I expect the damn flashlight to appear on a machine that’s at least 6 months into its lifespan, not a scant month after reinstallation.

Then we get the laughably OTT warning messages from the software I’m unistalling.

Yes, I know it won’t work if I uninstall the software. Trouble is, it doesn’t work WITH the damn software.

Am I the only one who finds the increasingly doom-ladened messages from software laughable when uninstalling it?

If you uninstall this software, your hardware will no-longer function. Also, your dog, cat and first-born child will become agents of satan and impale you in your sleep with rag-dolls soaked in methylated spirit, and then set them all aflame to the chants of “Oh Satan, lord and Master, give us this day our daily toast.”

I mean, honestly, get a bloody grip.

So, while I sit here alternately scoffing a rather nice asian rice and vegetarian stir-fry thing (with battery bits which I am assured are not fish, but tamarind), typing out this blog entry and glancing upwards periodically to watch the mind-numbingly slow progress bar sliding across the screen like a glacier in the ice-age, I wonder why.

Why what you might ask?

Why HP is creating such dross these days. Why it’s so damn hard to get their own software — supplied with the hardware, and that supplied by their barely navagable website — to actually do something as blindingly simple as print a damn document.

If I had a dollar for every hour I’d been working on this stupid problem, I’d be on a beach sunning my dazzlingly gorgeous body (and you’d have a gorgeous bod after 23 days of Bikram Yoga, let me tell you) on a beach in Acapulco, while swarthy male men-folk fall over themselves to be the next person to serve me a blindingly alcomoholic drinky.

But then I wasn’t. I’m in Melbourne being fed Chinese. Which would be nice, apart from the fact I still don’t have this stupid printer working.

Ah, it’s uninstalled. Onto the next stage of my evil plan: clean-up the registry.

Except there’s two folders and neither of them are clear enough for me to want to take a risk of turning this PC into the doorstop it so resembles.

Okay. Plan B – there’s some sort of HP software cleaner.

ooo, a carrot. Yum.

Sorry, got distracted with eating while waiting for the HP site to load.

Oh and in another win for idiocy over common-sense, the HP tool which will tell me if I need to update HP software will only work on IE 5.o and above.

Like the bloody tax-office; what’s the obsession with Internet Exploder anyway?

But I digress.

Clicking the back button on the web page just repeats the same test and I get the same stupid message. Click back on the Firefox interface instead… Dumbasses.

Okay, another tack again: some information I’ve come acrosss suggests that XP Sp2 might just cause some issues.

So drastic measures are called-for: let’s frag Sp2!

Hmmm, still unconvinced those non-fishy bits *were* non-fishy bits.

On the whole though, a nice meal. And there’s my lukewarm peppermint tea on the counter, too. Hmmm, cold tea; just the way I like it.

While the SP2 uninstaller grinds on like all those people out there who still think saying “Luxury!” followed by some bizarrely inane comment is still funny after, what is it, nearly 40 years, I shall add this.

Several of my cunningly discerning readership have pointed-out that endless PC bashing is unfair to PCs as a whole, and that they’e had just as much problems with Apple Macs.

To this I say, I believe you; I really do. It seems that any PC that comes within coo-ee (an Australian vernacular term meaning “within spitting-distance”, which is far more gross than you might actually think) of this little black duck seems to pop a cog when I start using it. I was a feared systems tester in one of my former jobs for this very reason; my abilities to not just break, but pound and nuke-til-it-glows various pieces of software was legendary. All right, semi-legendary.

The point I am attempting to make is this: My experience with Macs makes me love and admire them as easy to get along with and rarely do they actually make me swear. My experience with PCs is as diametrically opposite to that of Macs that it might as well be in an alternate universe wearing a goatee beard and cackling wildly about what it will do with me come daybreak.

Maybe that’s not the best way to put the point. I’ll try again.

PC’s don’t like me. I don’t like them. When we’re in the same room it’s an unpleasant experience for both of us, and frankly we’d rather let the relationship shrivel-up and die than spend another moment with one-another. We have no shared assets, resources or small humans running around causing chaos; it was fun, but it stopped being that a long, long time ago.

Oh, look: the status bar has disappeared on the uninstaller, and we’re “running processes after install”. How spiffing.

Good grief, now it’s playing the glocenspiel at me! What’s that all about? One minute you get more talk bubbles than a bloody cartoon strip, the next minute you get two-tone glocenspiel going off like Mike Oldfield in a cyclone.

Okay, it’s now 8pm and it’s performing the cleanup. I don’t expect that to take seconds, do you?

Damn, no more food. But the tea’s still there.

w00t! It’s finished.

To restart your computer, click Finish.

Only too glad. Fingers crossed…

Well, I’ve had some luck finding people with the same sort of HP printer problems as I’ve experienced. Glad to see I’m not the only one losing time and energy attempting to do something as simple as installing a printer.

It just goes to show what I was saying earlier: HP isn’t a company I’d like to deal with on an ongoing basis.

Honestly, if they made any other items in the world with this degree of difficulty to get them working, they’d be out of business in three minutes flat. What is it with the computer industry churning out stuff that becomes incredibly difficult to use?

Dear Hewlett Packard,

I have a friend who owns both a Windows XP PC and a HP Officejet 9110 multifunction print,fax,scan,copy machine.

I’ve recently been asked by her to clean-up and reinstall her system for her, a task which took a little time due to the computer being the aforementioned Windows machine.

However, I have achieved this task admirably.

That is, until it came to reinstalling your printer.

Initially I thought that the Windows drivers might handle the printer; the system certainly popped up saying the system had found the printer with monotonous regularity. But alas, this did not work once I shifted the printer to the Apple wireless network. It didn’t even work when the printer was connected to the computer!

So, I reconnected the printer to the computer and started again, with your purpose-built HP Officejet 9110 CDs which came with the unit.

This took a little time to install, but it wasn’t an issue, I felt like a latte anyway. When I arrived back from the shop, I found the software had installed. A quickish restart, and there appeared to be no more complaints.

Being the arse-covering tech that I am, I tried to print. This worked. Good; just what I was hoping for.

So I tried to scan something.

The printer initially came up with an error stating there was no software installed.

Funny, I thought, I could have sworn I just had a latte while waiting for the software to install. A quick check revealed my empty cup and there, in the Start Menu, was HP printer software.

Odd, I thought.

So I tried the process in reverse by firing up your image management software. Another latte later and it was up and running.

I clicked the scan button in the UI and was greeted with a message saying there was an error connecting to the scanner.

I checked the cable. Yes, connected. But of course it was connected; it just printed something.

Right, third try; Let’s try someone else’s software: Apple’s Bonjour in this case.

This solved the printing, but not the scanning.

Back to the drawing board, or more accurately, the Control Panel and the Add Remove Programmes folder, where I attempted to uninstall the HP printer programmes.

But to no avail; An error message told me I would have to attempt uninstallation again once I’d restarted the machine.

I resisted the urge to go out and get another latte; the caffeine was beginning to make me twitchy (or perhaps it was the ongoing frustrating failures of your software to speak with your hardware?). No matter; I was made of sterner stuff, so restarted the machine once more.

Then I tried the same process: Start>Control Panel>Add Remove Programmes.

And I got the same error message.

I wondered briefly if I had offended some heathen god, but persevered, finding an unistallation programme in the Start>Programs>HP printer folder. This uninstallation worked, and required only one more restart of the system.

Like the dutiful hardware user that I am, I performed said restart, located the HP CD once more and commenced the software reinstallation process. I went for lunch, knowing that it would finish some time before I arrived back.

And I was right, it had finished, and required another restart to make things work.

So I restarted the system and tried printing again. This worked. Good.

I tried scanning again. This did not.

I’m at a loss why your hardware won’t talk to your software and vice-versa on a clean installation of Windows XP SP2. There’s a direct connection, there’s nothing wrong with the cable (as evidenced by the fact the printer can receive a print message and that XP goes freaking bananas and beeps repeatedly at me when it’s connected); so what’s the issue?

Perhaps it thinks I should be running Vista. Think again bozo.

Perhaps it misses the old installation of XP? So sorry, it’s dead; move on.

Perhaps even, it just doesn’t like the muttering and cursing I have allowed to be uttered in its presence while trying to get it to work? Well, to quote The Master: tough, I’m like that when I’m frustrated at inane plastic objects refusing to work.

Whatever the reason, one thing is certain: as long as there is breath in my lungs, as long as I have conscious thought processes going through my head, I will Never Ever purchase an HP product.

Yours with much love and kisses,

Lisa 4.0

Windows fanboys and girls need-not read any further.

I’ve been sitting here all evening — 3 hours — trying to get software and hardware to work on an XP machine. 3 freaking hours.

HP and Windows aren’t good bedfellows. Neither is Palm and PC. Never mind the issue that Symantec virusscan had trying to do a liveupdate.

Everything is so damn hard on a PC. Why is that? Is there some sadistic-streak within every windows user? Or is it the old male paradigm of battling with everything until it bends to your will.

As a female I don’t get that sort of thing. I just don’t have the inclination (albeit I do tonight because friends have made me dinner in exchange for hopefully fixing their PC), but honestly, having to fiddle for hours on end in the vain hope that the fixes you make in the evening are still standing come the daylight, and not sitting there in a gelatenous heap stretches the belief-systems a bit thin. They are the single greatest time-sucker on this planet, the single simplest reason why the hordes of the great unwashed have not yet risen-up, thrown their shackles off and nailed their masters to the nearest tree.

I kid you not, Evil Overlords rule #1: If you want your takeover of the world to go smoothly, give the population PCs (and don’t be using them yourself).

But there is a bright-side to all this:

‘You’ve convinced me to get a mac,’ said G, the owner of the computer.

Chaos and destruction: the PC’s work is done.

HP* -  Shite!

MS** – CRAP

Why? Installing printers. Try installing a printer on an HP laptop… a printer that is connected to an apple airport network… and you’ve got hair ripping fun for the whole freaking family.

Here’s one of the many sites that I’ve just found — at 11pm at night while in bed — to potentially find a cause for the issue.

Bottom line, however, was that my plan to be in bed by 9pm has gone right out the damn window.

However, I have discovered — or managed to put into words — something that has dogged me for some time.

Which is this: I take failure personally.

—————-

*or as I now call them, Hewlett CRAPard

** Great piece of dialogue in “The Last of the Time Lords” (SPOILER ALERT), from the professor trying to get a computer to work: “Whoever thought we’d miss Bill Gates.”. I L O L’d.