I usually love my Mac, but right now is a big exception. When I got a new MacBook Pro earlier this year running Tiger (10.4), the migration over from my previous (two-ish year old, running 10.1 or 10.2 I think) machine went incredibly smoothly with the minor exception of no longer being able to print from the HP printer in SF. I could still print on the Oki in Bellevue; and Deborah (who had been running a later version of the OS than me) didn’t have any problems. So I assumed it was a pretty minor compatibility problem and that I’d just have to do something like reinstall drivers. Irritating, but no big deal.
Last night, six months later, I finally needed to print something in SF. So I googled the warning message and got a nice page in Apple’s forum which in turn pointed me to the HP issue page describing the incompatibility between 10.4 and my printer. I followed the 50+ step manual uninstallation process on the page, rebooted as instructed, found the download page (not linked to from the issue page), downloaded the 27MB installation file that matched the one on my CD, and installed, rebooted, went through the HP Setup Assistant’s configuration of the phone line I never use [if you leave it out, the printer doesn’t work] and was rewarded by a different error message.  I tracked it down, and discovered I had overlooked one step in the uninstall (resetting the disk protections); oops, my bad. I uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled, rebooted, configured, and got to a new and worse state. Hmm. So I once again uninstalled again, this time more meticulously; downloaded the newer 56MB “all-in-one executable” or whatever it’s called … no change noted. Since by this point it was 1 a.m. I gave up and mailed the link to Deborah who was kind enough to print it out.
And then when I opened up the computer this morning I was greated with the popup from the HP Setup Assistant. AAAARGH!
Sometimes all you can say is “feels a heck of a lot like Windows to me”.
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