Omg I hate printers
Jan. 8th, 2025 02:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverOr maybe it's that I hate printer companies. Or more specifically, I hate HP. But... I don't know why, but it's like printers are the most accursed objects in the history of the universe.
Way back in the early days of the internet (okay, not so early days - mid 2000s), I worked on a web application for a large client, and printing was the bane of our existence. Customers needed to be able to print things from the website, and it always seemed that printing would break with every release. Either things would stop printing, or they print incorrectly, or the options you'd choose wouldn't be applied, or any number of things. And, of course, different brands had their different quirks.
I'd hoped that the state of printing in the twenty intervening years had improved, and maybe it has, but it seems to also have introduced new problems, to make sure your printing experience is just as harrowing as ever.
I finally bought a printer for home back in 2021, though I don't remember why - maybe to print calligraphy guide sheets and exemplars. More recently, I've been printing music for the trad jazz band I was with. It's an HP laserjet, black and white only because I don't need color. Like most printers nowadays, it hooks up via wi-fi so all your computers can access it, and includes scanning and copying. It's actually been pretty nice. Sometime early last year (that's 2024; yes, we're in a new year now), it ran out of toner, so I bought a pack of third-party toner cartridges which worked fine.
Sometime late in the year, around October, I tried to print something and the print job failed: the software said it had sent the job, but nothing happened. I looked at the printer, and the power button was flashing and the LCD screen was flashing "HP". I searched on HP's site and found the page of "flashing lights and what they mean", and among all of the different possible combinations of lights flashing, it did not list what I was seeing. It did list similar combos, but not exactly the power button and the LCD "HP" thing together. Still, I tried all of the suggested fixes and none worked.
However, whatever it was I was trying to print wasn't important, so I resolved to try to fix it when I had a chance. And the chance is now.
In December, I did more focused research on what's wrong with the printer and found a number of pages on the HP site. Some suggested that I download specific software (HP Easy Start, HP Smart, and the driver collection) and use those to start it up, so I did, and none of them were able to detect the printer, no matter which route I took through them. I tried having the computer detect the printer, which it said it did, but when I then told it to access the printer, it said, "What printer?"
One of the pages said that maybe the wi-fi wasn't working, so use a USB-A cable to connect the printer directly to the computer, so that the HP software can then reset the wi-fi, so I put an order for the cable. It didn't arrive for a number of weeks (holiday season), but when it did, for some reason, there were two. Hm. Okay. I hooked the printer up to the computer and... nothing. None of the HP software packages saw anything connected. I even tried both cables.
Finally, I went to the HP support site, created an account, and posted in their community, detailing the problem and the flashing light combination, and all the things I'd done to try to resolve the issue. HP does have support techs, but they depend on their user community to answer questions, so I really wasn't sure if I'd get any actual help. After a couple of days of no responses, I stopped checking until after the holidays.
In the meantime, my husband went reading about problems with HP printers, and he discovered that people have been complaining about HP's ink policies. The complaint was that HP requires you to subscribe to their ink service, to force you to use their ink, and if you don't or you use a third-party ink cartridge, the company forces the printer to stop working.
Oh great. I have third-party cartridges. Is that the problem? I mean, the cartridge worked earlier, but maybe they pushed a firmware update that killed my cartridge? Fine, I'll order an official HP cartridge.
That arrived and I put it in, and no, the printer still didn't work. Then, in a move that I should have done earlier, I researched HP's ink policies. No, HP doesn't force you to use their ink. Yes, they do have a subscription service that you can pay for, which monitors how many pages you print and sends you replacement ink when your ink is getting low, but that's your choice. And yes, if you mess with their subscription service (such as putting a third-party cartridge into the printer when you're on the subscription service), they'll probably stop your printer from working, to preserve the integrity of the service. But if you're not on the subscription service, they don't block you from using third-party cartridges.
Not to mention, they only have a subscription service for inkjet printers. They got rid of their subscription for laserjets, which is what I have, so that doesn't affect me at all. (Though now I know the difference between ink and toner and will stop mixing the terms up.)
So finally, after Christmas, I checked back at HP and a support tech, who I'll call Tech 1, replied to my post! He (male name) suspected that the printer lost wi-fi connection and gave a list of things to do to re-establish it, including how to reset the printer to factory settings. I went through all of the procedures and - you got it - they didn't work.
I replied back to my post, detailing everything I did and their outcome, and asked for more assistance. No response. After a week and a half, I sent a private message to Tech 1, saying that I had responded to his message with info, so could he please go take a look (I gave him a link to the post) and respond to the post with more assistance.
A couple of days later (yesterday), I received a message from a different tech, Tech 2. They (I can't tell the gender from the name) told me, "Please reply to your original public post or create a new post to assist you further." Okay, that's what I did. So I responded, saying I did so.
And now today. I received a response from Tech 2 saying, "I'd love to help" but "we encourage our customers to create a public post so that the conversation may help other community members", so please "create a new public post with the same query, so that you may get your answers from the various members."
In other words, they're saying, "I could help you by answering your original post, but instead, why don't you go make a new post so that someone else, probably a customer and not a tech, might do it instead."
I am happy to report that I managed to refrain from swearing in my response to them. I'm expecting that the next response to them will be, "F$&# this, I'm buying a Canon." A basic Canon laserjet costs less than the time and money I've spent on trying to get this printer working again.
I think that HP's not getting another cent of my money, on anything. My last work computer was an HP, and it was horrible. And now the printer. The only HP thing that I like is their calculators, and that's only because HP is the only company that makes an RPN calculator... and if I need to replace my HP calculator, there are companies that make calculators that simulate the old, good HP RPN calculators. So, I'm covered there as well. It's really sad, because HP used to be awesome, and now it's just a joke.
Way back in the early days of the internet (okay, not so early days - mid 2000s), I worked on a web application for a large client, and printing was the bane of our existence. Customers needed to be able to print things from the website, and it always seemed that printing would break with every release. Either things would stop printing, or they print incorrectly, or the options you'd choose wouldn't be applied, or any number of things. And, of course, different brands had their different quirks.
I'd hoped that the state of printing in the twenty intervening years had improved, and maybe it has, but it seems to also have introduced new problems, to make sure your printing experience is just as harrowing as ever.
I finally bought a printer for home back in 2021, though I don't remember why - maybe to print calligraphy guide sheets and exemplars. More recently, I've been printing music for the trad jazz band I was with. It's an HP laserjet, black and white only because I don't need color. Like most printers nowadays, it hooks up via wi-fi so all your computers can access it, and includes scanning and copying. It's actually been pretty nice. Sometime early last year (that's 2024; yes, we're in a new year now), it ran out of toner, so I bought a pack of third-party toner cartridges which worked fine.
Sometime late in the year, around October, I tried to print something and the print job failed: the software said it had sent the job, but nothing happened. I looked at the printer, and the power button was flashing and the LCD screen was flashing "HP". I searched on HP's site and found the page of "flashing lights and what they mean", and among all of the different possible combinations of lights flashing, it did not list what I was seeing. It did list similar combos, but not exactly the power button and the LCD "HP" thing together. Still, I tried all of the suggested fixes and none worked.
However, whatever it was I was trying to print wasn't important, so I resolved to try to fix it when I had a chance. And the chance is now.
In December, I did more focused research on what's wrong with the printer and found a number of pages on the HP site. Some suggested that I download specific software (HP Easy Start, HP Smart, and the driver collection) and use those to start it up, so I did, and none of them were able to detect the printer, no matter which route I took through them. I tried having the computer detect the printer, which it said it did, but when I then told it to access the printer, it said, "What printer?"
One of the pages said that maybe the wi-fi wasn't working, so use a USB-A cable to connect the printer directly to the computer, so that the HP software can then reset the wi-fi, so I put an order for the cable. It didn't arrive for a number of weeks (holiday season), but when it did, for some reason, there were two. Hm. Okay. I hooked the printer up to the computer and... nothing. None of the HP software packages saw anything connected. I even tried both cables.
Finally, I went to the HP support site, created an account, and posted in their community, detailing the problem and the flashing light combination, and all the things I'd done to try to resolve the issue. HP does have support techs, but they depend on their user community to answer questions, so I really wasn't sure if I'd get any actual help. After a couple of days of no responses, I stopped checking until after the holidays.
In the meantime, my husband went reading about problems with HP printers, and he discovered that people have been complaining about HP's ink policies. The complaint was that HP requires you to subscribe to their ink service, to force you to use their ink, and if you don't or you use a third-party ink cartridge, the company forces the printer to stop working.
Oh great. I have third-party cartridges. Is that the problem? I mean, the cartridge worked earlier, but maybe they pushed a firmware update that killed my cartridge? Fine, I'll order an official HP cartridge.
That arrived and I put it in, and no, the printer still didn't work. Then, in a move that I should have done earlier, I researched HP's ink policies. No, HP doesn't force you to use their ink. Yes, they do have a subscription service that you can pay for, which monitors how many pages you print and sends you replacement ink when your ink is getting low, but that's your choice. And yes, if you mess with their subscription service (such as putting a third-party cartridge into the printer when you're on the subscription service), they'll probably stop your printer from working, to preserve the integrity of the service. But if you're not on the subscription service, they don't block you from using third-party cartridges.
Not to mention, they only have a subscription service for inkjet printers. They got rid of their subscription for laserjets, which is what I have, so that doesn't affect me at all. (Though now I know the difference between ink and toner and will stop mixing the terms up.)
So finally, after Christmas, I checked back at HP and a support tech, who I'll call Tech 1, replied to my post! He (male name) suspected that the printer lost wi-fi connection and gave a list of things to do to re-establish it, including how to reset the printer to factory settings. I went through all of the procedures and - you got it - they didn't work.
I replied back to my post, detailing everything I did and their outcome, and asked for more assistance. No response. After a week and a half, I sent a private message to Tech 1, saying that I had responded to his message with info, so could he please go take a look (I gave him a link to the post) and respond to the post with more assistance.
A couple of days later (yesterday), I received a message from a different tech, Tech 2. They (I can't tell the gender from the name) told me, "Please reply to your original public post or create a new post to assist you further." Okay, that's what I did. So I responded, saying I did so.
And now today. I received a response from Tech 2 saying, "I'd love to help" but "we encourage our customers to create a public post so that the conversation may help other community members", so please "create a new public post with the same query, so that you may get your answers from the various members."
In other words, they're saying, "I could help you by answering your original post, but instead, why don't you go make a new post so that someone else, probably a customer and not a tech, might do it instead."
I am happy to report that I managed to refrain from swearing in my response to them. I'm expecting that the next response to them will be, "F$&# this, I'm buying a Canon." A basic Canon laserjet costs less than the time and money I've spent on trying to get this printer working again.
I think that HP's not getting another cent of my money, on anything. My last work computer was an HP, and it was horrible. And now the printer. The only HP thing that I like is their calculators, and that's only because HP is the only company that makes an RPN calculator... and if I need to replace my HP calculator, there are companies that make calculators that simulate the old, good HP RPN calculators. So, I'm covered there as well. It's really sad, because HP used to be awesome, and now it's just a joke.
