Is it just me...



  • <font size="7">OR IS HP'S SOFTWARE THE WORST SHIT EVER DESIGNED?</font>
    I've been trying to scan from a laserjet 2840, and it's impossible. The driver cd contains more than 400 MB of complete and utter waste of perfectly good bytes.

    The crap from this cd simply cripples the pc, it installs it's own (ancient) java runtime, needs extra firewall configuration, installs several system tray monitors and a thousand drivers. And it still doesn't work. I'm going to kill someone.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gabelstaplerfahrer said:

    <font size="1">OR IS HP'S SOFTWARE THE WORST SHIT EVER DESIGNED?</font>
    You're forgetting the trueism that all vendors' products suck.

    Except for one industry of course.



  •  I don't know if that's true, I quite like HP's printserver firmware, strangly enough... but yes, most vendors' extra software feels like an afterthought. "The product is finished and works, let's ship it. Oh shit, the software isn't ready. Ah well, let's press the CDs anyway, long live the internet!" And then they forget to actually patch the software.



  • @Gabelstaplerfahrer said:

    I've been trying to scan from a laserjet 2840, and it's impossible.

    Hang on, is it a laser printer, an inkjet printer, or a scanner? Or some crazy hybrid?



  •  That, and "screw documentation".



  • I gave up on HP printers and scanners.

    Even the older printer installer insisted on decompressing the entire install CD onto the hard drive - so I couldn't instal a simple printer onto an old laptop with 1GB of free space. Paper feed (on several models) was unreliable.

    The scanner software is abysmal - it insists on doing a preview, then a real scan, for every page. Then it would crash after three or four pages of a multi-page scan, if the virus checker background scan was running (McAfee - I know, I won't be using them again either). The printer/scanner also had a habit of locking up so severely that I had to switch off and disconnect the mains from both PC and printer for several minutes to recover. Finally even that didn't work so I gave up and bought an Epson all-in-one which (so far, and touch wood) has performed flawlessly, including scanning 100 pages to a single PDF. Even the newer HP laser printers at work are nothing like as good as the old ones used to be. Strangely, my home PC is an HP and that works quite well.

    /rant



  • @Gabelstaplerfahrer said:

    <font size="1">OR IS HP'S SOFTWARE THE WORST SHIT EVER DESIGNED?</font>
     

    I'm not sure about that, but back in the 90s I noticed that for every piece of software IBM provided for AIX, HP provided a very broken clone for HP-UX. 



  • @PJH said:

    You're forgetting the trueism that all vendors' products suck.

    Except for one industry of course.

     

    Nah, that's taking it too far.

    HP's software has sucked continuously since the first time they tried to write code. There's no defending it; it's just really really bad software. Seriously, it's awful.

    BUT.

    I have a Canon scanner (LiDE thingy -- great! really!),  and while the sanning software looks a little odd, it's extremely usable, stable, and performs exactly as expected. It is Good Software. I only wonder why their camera software, ZoomBrowser, is just as godawful as HP's heap of programming.

    My dad used to have an Agfa scanner with Scanwise software. It was very good, just like Canon's scan software.



  •  just download the enterprise/corporate drivers. they don't have all the bloat.

     



  • The thing I hate about HP drivers for my printer, is that they force me to install their 700 MB ImageZone (though there's an "Express" version which is "only" 300 MB). I even tried using the Add Hardware wizard to manually pick the .inf file, but it still launched the installer. OTOH, it has always installed with no problems and worked well.



  • @PJH said:

    @Gabelstaplerfahrer said:

    <font size="1">OR IS HP'S SOFTWARE THE WORST SHIT EVER DESIGNED?</font>
    You're forgetting the trueism that all vendors' products suck.

    Except for one industry of course.

     

    I agree on the HP thing. My experience es that the cheaper the device and/or the more functions it has, the more the Vendor software sucks.

    At least with HP one can re-download a working windows printing environment should the original device CD be lost - other vendors don't give this option: you lose your Epson CD - that is it:printer = doorstop.

    I like the software that comes with this company's products: They don't supply any. Their documentation is good - though: see this example.

     



  • HP for Windows stuff sucks, yes.

    However ljet4 and hpijs don't suck much*. Then again it's a mix of GPL/MIT/BSD licensed stuff.

    Of course, that may be because I don't have printer models that require the binary blobs in hpijs.


     

     

     

    *more than CUPS does. Although that's getting better.



  • @cklam said:

    other vendors don't give this option: you lose your Epson CD - that is it:printer = doorstop.

    I dunno, me found Epson scanner/printer drivers on their website.

     



  • @alegr said:

    @cklam said:

    other vendors don't give this option: you lose your Epson CD - that is it:printer = doorstop.

    I dunno, me found Epson scanner/printer drivers on their website.

     

     

    Conceded, my experience was three years ago. I gave the printer to a colleague (who still had the CD and two sets of ink cartridges but his printer was broken beyond repair) in exchange for a free lunch.

    So, nowadays one can lose their EPSON printer's CD - hmmm. Have to keep that in mind.



  • @obediah said:

    @Gabelstaplerfahrer said:

    <font size="1">OR IS HP'S SOFTWARE THE WORST SHIT EVER DESIGNED?</font>
     

    I'm not sure about that, but back in the 90s I noticed that for every piece of software IBM provided for AIX, HP provided a very broken clone for HP-UX. 

    Hey, HP-UX might be the last piece of HP software that's actually decent! As well as their HP 9000 Series servers, but that's hardware.

    I really think those in charge of HP must really hate HP, as they've been able to trash every single thing that HP was good at: PA-RISC, HP-UX, and turning their printer software into bloatware. Urgh.



  • I have an HP printer at home, and never had any problems with actually getting it to work, but yeah, the software is really horrible.  It isn't that it doesn't work, but instead of just quietly installing the proper drivers, it has to install some special HP-brand crap that's not even related (I think a photo gallery program or something), plus having a few different processes that run all the time (with an annoying tray icon) that also always hang when I shut down the computer, and it seems like half of it uses an ugly custom widget toolkit. The tray icon especially bothers me for some reason - it just doesn't deserve its own icon there.  When something's printing, the normal Windows "X documents printing" tray icon shows up anyways, which is the only time you should need to get quick access to the printer controls.  When nothing's printing, the HP tray icon just serves as a shortcut, but WHY?  My printer's not any more important than my ethernet card, or scanner, for example.  If I had a tray icon for every single device or vaguely important piece of software, there would be no room on the bottom of the screen for anything else.  It's like the guys at HP who thought this up don't know the printer's proper place in the whole system ("Hey!  This is the most important bit of hardware anyone will ever own, so let's make sure that they have instant access to it all the time!  And no one has their own photo gallery or image editing software, they need our own versions, which are of course way above any of the crap produced by those companies which actually specialize in this stuff, so we need to make it hard to NOT install it at the same time as the drivers!  Users will thank us!").

     

    That's enough of my incoherent ranting for now...



  •  Well, they haven't managed to ruin VMS yet.



  •  I was once asked to speed up a clients computer. Turned out one of the background programms was using 100% cpu, and of course it was something HP wrote (or at least, distributed with an all-in-one of theirs.So I simply turned off every single process and programm that would start at boot and had even the slightest hint it might be from HP.

     That at least fixed the 100% CPU, but would the printer still work? Did a testrun: print, fax, scan, everything was working perfectly. I've litterally no idea why all that clutter was running in the background...

    Everytime I have to install a printer I discard all cd's (or worse: DVDs) right away, go to the website and look for a driver that isn't a gazillion exabytes in size and use that instead. I've got a perfect score so far...



  •  Well I just downloaded the basic drivers for my psc 2500 and it worked immediatly and without problems (altough the TWAIN could be better, but also could be worse). And I can also automagically print from other computers on the network.



  • To answer the OP, no. HP's shit is the second worst software ever. Their hardware is the worst ever, but Lexmark takes the cake for software.



    A few years ago I bought an HP Pavillion that came with a printer. The printer didn't work to begin with. The rollers wouldn't come down to pick up paper. This fixed itself after I stuffed so much paper into it that they didn't need to come down.

    The PC also didn't work to begin with. Besides coming with Windows ME and McAfee preinstalled, it overheated after being on for a few hours, and the thermal reboot (not even shutdown) didn't kick in until the plastic coating on the IDE cables had started to melt. Needed an extra fan right out of the box.

    There was something wrong with the CPU, or motherboard, or something on that machine. I never pinpointed the problem. Memtest86 and similar programs reported no problems, but certain programs would just do strange things or create corrupt output only on that machine. This followed several OS reinstalls, formats, and even prevented Linux live CDs from working properly. I suspect it was the CPU, because one day when I removed the heat sink (can't remember why), it quite literally fell apart.

    I also discovered the recovery CDs were encrypted, so you couldn't use all that extra software bundled with it on any other computer, even though you still had the license to do so. (Fortunately, weak protection. The zip files' password is "pandora".)
    The printer lasted a surprisingly long time, but I don't think it ever worked on the first try. It'd suck in two or sheets at once and print half on one and half on the other, or just refuse to do anything. One day it jammed up, and I discovered there's no way to unjam it. You can't run it backward, you can't pull the paper back out (rrrrriiiip), and it's riveted together so you can't open it up. One paper jam and it becomes a doorstop.

    The software was bloated, about 400MB, but I never installed it. I just let Windows find the driver on the disc and skip the rest of the crap.



    The Lexmark, on the other hand... I never did get it to print anything. It came with 700MB of bloatware. The drivers were hidden somewhere in it so that Windows couldn't find them - you had to run the installer, which gave no options or selections at all. It just proceeded to dump 700MB of shit on the system, which would then basically take right over, working its way into startup entries, dropping toolbars everywhere, and hogging up all available RAM and CPU time like some sort of nasty malware. Which actually describes it pretty well. There was of course no way to uninstall this shit, and no other way to get the drivers. I had to use System Restore to get it back to a usable state, and proceeded to return the whole damn thing.



    Then I got a Canon, which worked great. No fuss, no muss. Stick the disc in, the drivers are all right in plain view. Install them and print, works great. Until I switched to Linux and found there are no drivers for it at all.



    I hate printers.



  • @Gabelstaplerfahrer said:

    I've been trying to scan from a laserjet 2840, and it's impossible. The driver cd contains more than 400 MB of complete and utter waste of perfectly good bytes.
    Stay away from HP's products aimed at home user if you want to keep sanity. 400MB isn't even that much, some of their all-in-ones try to dump over a gigabyte of stuff (and in at least one case they installed something that was incompatible with the HP machine I was installing it on, so after reboot Windows wouldn't start up anymore).@cklam said:
    So, nowadays one can lose their EPSON printer's CD - hmmm. Have to keep that in mind.
    I've had several Epson inkjets at home over the years and never used the CDs that came with them - I always downloaded the drivers.

    Nowadays I use a Samsung laser at home though - it was fairly cheap, and has a built-in network card, so everybody can print to it without turning on the machine next to which it's set up. And the drivers are just that - drivers (there's some sort of diagnostic/configuration tool included, but it's an optional install).



  •  @obediah said:

    @Gabelstaplerfahrer said:

    <font size="1">OR IS HP'S SOFTWARE THE WORST SHIT EVER DESIGNED?</font>
     

    I'm not sure about that, but back in the 90s I noticed that for every piece of software IBM provided for AIX, HP provided a very broken clone for HP-UX. 

    Well that just makes sense, you gotta have the same features as the comp'tition! Because that's what you can put on the box, it makes for a nice list. The features don't have to actually work, just like with the printermestuction apparatus here. The box doesn't have to say it all works. The box just has to look better than the competition. "I can print!" "Oh, I can print in COLOR!" "Pick me! Pick me! I can scan!" "No I can scan AND I have a paper feed!" - and instead, the humble matrix printer just churns out print after print for 20 years straight, on the same ink ribbon...



  • @lolwtf said:

    ... You can't run it backward, you can't pull the paper back out (rrrrriiiip), and it's riveted together so you can't open it up. ...
     

    Big LOL at the rivets, that just nails it. So yes, HP definitely gets top three positions for both worst hard- and software ever made, regarding to printers at least. We should make a Wikipedia article just for that.



  • @lolwtf said:

    but Lexmark takes the cake for software

    I have to second this, for similar reasons you experienced (without, admittedly, the horrors of a system restore).  I still wonder if there is any legacy of that Lexmark shit lurking around in that old PC anywhere.  I will never, ever buy a Lexmark printer again.  Only bought one at all because I urgently needed a dirt cheap, off the shelf, up and running quickly effort.  Read: dirt cheap, off the shelf, up and running fucking never.

    I do wonder however if I hadn't been in a hurry, and had done the sensible thing and tried to find a bloatless basic driver online, whether it would have worked painlessly.  I actually strongly suspect it might have.



  • I am stupefied. HP has put a tool on their website, waaaay back in 2005 actually, that fixes the scanner problem. It's called the LaserJet Fix Scan Utility, and for once, it's not bloatware. The tool can be found here, and if the link doesn't work, it can be found at the bottom of the page where your drivers can be downloaded. Suggestion: unzip the .exe in a folder and run the .exe from there, the utility doesn't need to be installed.



  • @Gabelstaplerfahrer said:

    I am stupefied. HP has put a tool on their website, waaaay back in 2005 actually, that fixes the scanner problem. It's called the LaserJet Fix Scan Utility, and for once, it's not bloatware. The tool can be found here, and if the link doesn't work, it can be found at the bottom of the page where your drivers can be downloaded. Suggestion: unzip the .exe in a folder and run the .exe from there, the utility doesn't need to be installed.

    What if I'm using Linux?



  •  Then you're screwed, I assume.



  • @operagost said:

     Well, they haven't managed to ruin VMS yet.

    Give 'em until VMS 10.0, it'll really suck by then. :/



  • @derula said:

    @Gabelstaplerfahrer said:

    I am stupefied. HP has put a tool on their website, waaaay back in 2005 actually, that fixes the scanner problem. It's called the LaserJet Fix Scan Utility, and for once, it's not bloatware. The tool can be found here, and if the link doesn't work, it can be found at the bottom of the page where your drivers can be downloaded. Suggestion: unzip the .exe in a folder and run the .exe from there, the utility doesn't need to be installed.

    What if I'm using Linux?

    Then you didn't have the problem in the first place.



  • @Gabelstaplerfahrer said:

    Big LOL at the rivets, that just nails it.
     

    Ah, I see what you did there!


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