Hewlett-Packard vent...

[deeaa*]

Man, I need to vent about my inkjet...this is the LAST piece of HP equipment I'll ever buy for sure. Nothing made by Hewlett- Packard will ever come near my house again. I've had their scanners, printers, PDA, drives, whatever, and EVERY single piece of equipment from HP has been utterly crap in one way or another.

Now the annoyance is my inkjet. Sure, I understand an inkjet is NOT the good choice when you don't print every day or whatever, and I do have a laser as well...but man, I bought new inks for it just this summer, cost me something like $70 too...and, I've printed about 3 full pages and 3-4 photographs on it in 6 months or so...and now it's dry again!

And the best thing is I haven't even used the thing in weeks, and the last I did it reported it had about half full cassettes.
Now apparently that I installed a new Office 2010 suite and it made me re-install all printer drivers for some reason, it somehow deducted I must be a new owner or whatever and reports no ink...or some other built-in planned obsolescence scheme.

And now it's basically almost cheaper to buy a new printer than keep shelling out money for these damned HP cartridges...and it goes to thrash having printed maybe two dozen pages in its life, complete with nice TFT displays and whatnot...and the world is saved...

[aeolian]

Dee, it is frustrating when thing don't work.

I have never had an HP inkjet, but I've had 2 Epson inkjets. My current one is an Epson all-in-one and it has worked well for several years, but ink will always occasionally be a problem. I read somewhere that inkjet printers should be turned off if they are not in use since leaving it on tend to cause the inkjet heads to clog up; I always do that. Even then the inkjet heads still clog up every once in a while. Then I have to run the cleaning process to get them unclogged. I assume the ink I use make a difference also. I don't buy Epson ink, but instead I buy compatible cartridges as they are a lot cheaper. There has been times when I bought cartridges of inferior quality which tend to clog more often and won't get unclogged unless I run the cleaning process over and over. And it wastes a lot of ink during cleaning. I have found a pretty good source of compatible ink now that has worked well for me the last couple of years. One features that I find to be very useful with this Epson is that I can scan documents into an pdf file (OK, it is really the software that does this). This makes emailing documents a lot simpler.

My only recent experience with HP equipment is an all-in-all computer (essentially an iMac lookalike) which I bought to replace my old desktop which died early this year. It has worked fine for about 9 months now so my opinion of HP equipment is a bit higher than yours.

[Eric***]

I had a laserjet that worked pretty well for me for several years. Didn't hurt that I got it for free from my friend, but since it died I'm printer-less. I guess I'll have to plunge back into the market eventually, but when I do I will strongly consider a laser printer instead of an inkjet.

[deeaa*]

Laser is definitely the way to go...I have two laser printers, both Samsung, and no issues with them.

I think the next one will be a color laser...they just tend to be quite big, which can be a problem.
And then I'll stick to ordering photos online. It's way easier not to mention cheaper anyway.

[Bookkeeper's Son]

The printer cartridge business is a major ripoff, and HP is one of the biggest culprits. I refill my own with bulk ink. WAYYYYYYY cheaper.

[sunvalleylaw]

My HP 5mp laserwriter, purchased in 1995!! still serves as a very good printer. Our more recent HP laserjets for home use have all been less good by a long shot. But any of our inkjets have been essentially garbage. I may bring my 5mp home for most printing, leaving the inkjet only for color, or invest in a decent laser printer for home. The Brother products seem pretty good lately, and the Canon's get good reviews.

[marnold***]

Laser is definitely the way to go...I have two laser printers, both Samsung, and no issues with them.

I've got a Samsung ML-1710 as well. Cheap, but it runs like a champ. WAY cheaper per page than an ink jet.

[Tig***]

My HP 5mp laserwriter, purchased in 1995!! still serves as a very good printer. Our more recent HP laserjets for home use have all been less good by a long shot. But any of our inkjets have been essentially garbage. I may bring my 5mp home for most printing, leaving the inkjet only for color, or invest in a decent laser printer for home. The Brother products seem pretty good lately, and the Canon's get good reviews.

^ +1

HP lasers are usually excellent. I've worked with and on them for many years back when I did more hands on tech support. Their stinkjets, no way!

I've had good luck with recent Canon inkjets, however.

[guitartango]

Don't get me started on HP Support or the lack of it..........

Calling Support

ME.... my server is dead, i have changed both power supplies and still dead.
HP Can you go into the bios for me ?
Me How ?
HP Press F2
Me How, there is no power to the server?
HP What does the screen tell you
Me Nothing it is blank
HP Can you find a screen that works
Me No, the server is dead
HP Are there any lights on
Me No it's dead, like a parrot (dead parrot sketch)
HP Can you open the Server and take the ram out
Me Nothing to do with the server, its the main board
HP We cant go on until you have taken out the ram
Me Look, nothing to do with the ram, the main board has died... no power at all
HP (on hold for 20 minutes)........
Me Now swearing to myself
HP Looks like the main board has gone
Me We have four hrs support
HP Sorry but you have missed the deadline
Me For F*** sake , you have kept me waiting for half an hour !!!!!
HP No need to swear Sir
Me ok
HP Anything i can do for you Sir ?
Me (under my breath.......Train your staff correctly).......
Me No thanks
HP Have a good day
Me.........

This call took 30 minutes to find the fault ....... Dell took 5 minutes with the same sort of problem.

HP - support staff based in India
Dell support either the Neverlands or Ireland

[markb]

Most inkjets are pretty poor in build quality. My last printer was a Canon iP4500. Much more solid than the HP it replaced, it could actually feed paper straight (a major pain for photo printing) and the colour was accurate without hours of profiling. The HP just stopped recognising cartridges one day.

[poodlesrule]

Related: I was just checking something on a Linux forum and someone said that an HP laptop was rejecting a non-stock wifi card, as, apparently, the BIOS 'whitelists' approved peripherals, and you can't even past POST with a non-approved one. Poster indicated he had no trouble of the sort with Dell, Acer, or Toshiba laptops.

Other/related: Locally, we had the venerable Digital Equipment Corp., or DEC. You could see the sign from the road, at DEC main campus. It then became Compaq, and it was sad-looking. I assume it reads HP now?
A couple of years ago, I actually contracted for a start-up which was located in the mill building, original home of DEC. Odd thing to walk around the place where so much computer work was done!
DEC's success brought tremendous weath to the area and created a huge pool of computer and specialized manufacturing expertise, and that momentum is still strong, many years later after DEC's passing.