From my point of view HP printers are a bad investment.
Fuck HP, buy a laser from brother or someone else. Anyone else but HP
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I’ve had the same brother laser printer since uni (shit thats like 10 years ago now) and it’s never let me down. The only issue is it stops responding over the network sometimes when I Havnt used it in months.
Laser brother fist bump
I built a PC for my little sister in 2007. She was starting college and didn’t have a computer. It totaled 2805 and some change, custom built through Antares Digital (When you know, you Lili). These were all top of the line components (Asus M2N32-WS PRO, Amd athlon64 X2 AM2 5200, Corsair Memory). Not a cheapy system in its day.
Three nights before I was to deliver it to her, I completed all of the setup, had all the software ready to go, even setting up a custom theme for her (We were both metalheads). My folks said that she would need a printer/fax/copy/scanner as well, so last minute, I ended up buying an HP 5610 at target for 192 dollars.
The HP instructions didn’t say that if you connected the cable between the printer and the PC before you had installed the drivers, the printer would not mount as a device. In fact, it would never connect to that PC ever again. Apparently, it ruined the registry until you reformatted and reinstalled the OS.
To be fair, the manual did say to install the drivers first, then the cable, but this was not the norm back then and they didn’t really emphasize it in any way, nor did it mention that you were about to be FITA big time. Had to scramble to completely reformat the drive, reinstall all the software… Essentially, starting over from a blank slate and getting done in 2 days for delivery to her dorm on move in day. It did connect second time around.
I wrote them an angry letter regarding the poor deployment, but of course I never heard back from them. Never bought another HP for myself or anyone else ever again. I go out of my way to encourage people to not buy anything from HP. If I happen to be somewhere and see someone looking at an HP printer, I’ll just approach them, introduce myself, and tell them my story to discourage them from buying it.
The HP instructions didn’t say that if you connected the cable between the printer and the PC before you had installed the drivers, the printer would not mount as a device. In fact, it would never connect to that PC ever again. Apparently, it ruined the registry until you reformatted and reinstalled the OS.
How do they manage to fuck something up so royally? They clearly knew it was a problem, as they outlined it in their manual. But there’s no way it was cheaper to deal with all the angry support calls and lost customer confidence than to just add some code to the driver installer that fixes the registry settings…
If this happened to me, I wouldn’t reinstall my operating system, I would tell their support technician to fuck off and go buy a printer from a different company.
Or even just putting a piece of paper on top of the printer that says, “STOP!! INSTALL THE DRIVERS BEFORE PLUGGING THE PRINTER INTO THE PC”
Surely HP could spend $0.000125 out of their billions of dollars to spare a piece of paper to serve that purpose.
I mean >15% of people will still fuck this up, but at that point, you’ve done all you can.
Even the leaflet is just a shitty bandaid. What if someone picked up a printer used and it didn’t include the leaflet.
It’s outright unacceptable to ship a consumer product that so easily bricks itself like this.
That’s a good point actually. I agree, the whole thing is just bananas. HP is a zombie tech company at this point though. You know that graphic that illustrates the product life cycle? HP products are somewhere down in the subway station on that graph
if you connected the cable between the printer and the PC before you had installed the drivers, the printer would not mount as a device. In fact, it would never connect to that PC ever again. Apparently, it ruined the registry until you reformatted and reinstalled the OS.
Don’t take this as a defense of HP… but it’s a known behavior of Windows where once it associates a device with some driver, like the default ones which didn’t work for that printer, it won’t try to search for new drivers again… until the device is removed from the system.
There are several ways of doing that, this is a modern writeup:
Back in the day, there were several different ways:
- Go into Device Admin, click on show hidden devices, and remove the wrongly detected printer.
- Use… I don’t recall the name right now, but there is a tiny tool that allows you to remove unused devices, handily sorted by “last used” date.
- Use any of several tools that allow you doing the same, including some PowerShell commands.
You didn’t need to reinstall.
And they’re investing in the customers in what sense? It’s the customers who make the investment in their products and get their dignity challenged in return.
I have a need for a printer and HP is solidly in the don’t-touch list. Companies that treat their customers so indignantly as HP should simply be raided and closed for good. Or perhaps, HP should realize that morons like this scumbag are a bad investment as a CEO.
I have a need for a printer and HP is solidly in the don’t-touch list.
The only HP printers I still recommend are the vintage ones from the pre-2005 era. HP 4050DTN and HP 5000DTN and the like. Absolutely rock-solid laser printers that don’t have DRM or any other shite. Hell, I can get overstuffed cartridges for the 4050 that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage… who does that these days? And they’re capable of taking JetDirect cards clear up to the gigabit level.
This CEO has defended HP’s actions by stating the need to protect intellectual property and highlighting potential issues and security risks associated with non-HP cartridges.
Go fucking jump in a pit of lava, Lores.
They keep hiring CEOs like this. Fiorina was no better. The board clearly wants the company to function this way.
Buying anything HP is a bad investment
I’ve had really good experiences with their cheaper laptops in general. I tend to immediately blast Windows off them and replace it with Linux and I generally end up with a solid, reliable little work station with a 3-4 year life span, for an affordable price.
Clearly not buying HP was a very good investment for me :)
Looks like we’re at an impasse; customers don’t want to make a bad investment by using HP either.
tl;dr - salty ceo is salty
Hps one of only two companies that will never get a penny from me again. I had an HP desktop that the power supply died on at the beginning of Covid only then did I realise it was propriety and they didn’t even have it in stock.
Kept checking for about a year and couldn’t get a replacement when every other computer I’ve ever owned I could have bought a power supply the same damn day.
For the record the other company is Sony who just decided to delete my account with a lot of paid games because I hadn’t logged in for about 6 months.
HP lured me away from Apple about 15 years ago, with promises of better pay and benefits. I made the mistake of believing their lies, and proceeded to work in one of the most hostile environments I’d ever encountered. Aside from the open and constant sexual harassment, I was horrified to see customer service maliciously transfer callers to dead extensions or to the branch in the Philippines, then laugh about it. “Tech support” was for selling more products, not for resolving issues. Management was a shitshow of nepotism, falling-over-drunkenness, corruption, office affairs, and massive cover-ups.
I lasted 8 months, then I fled back to Apple, but I’ll never forget how HP blatantly loathed the customers.
Aside from the open and constant sexual harassment,
I wonder if they’re still getting away with that in 2024…
Holy fuck it must be a slow news day. This is the third headline I’ve seen about this comment
Companies that act like their customers are an investment are the worst investment.
The worst part about HP is that I already have one of their printers but don’t use it enough to justify replacing it 😔
HP shouldn’t market their product themselves, this only leads to dependence on off-topic business models such as subscriptions. HP is a producer (AFAIK), not a print shop.
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