Monday, February 7, 2005

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEvil -- 8:53 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

I've spent considerable thought-time today pondering the question of which is the greater evil: Microsoft, just because it's Microsoft, or HP, whose software destroyed my weekend.

On Saturday I went down to Beast Buy and coughed up some heavy dough for a decent printer/copier/scanner/fax, the HP Photosmart 2610. It got good reviews, it has good features, it's had some good word-of-mouth. I need something decent for my new business venture and decided that the 2610 was the one for me. After bringing it home and setting it up, I had the USB cable in hand... and then decided to go with the cool and nifty Ethernet installation.

Big mistake. The printer was operational for a full 30 minutes before taking down my LAN, my VOIP adapter and DSL connection for the rest of the day. I attempted repeatedly to uninstall the HP drivers and software, but the uninstall always crashed on me. At midnight I gave up. Yesterday I attempted to uninstall yet again. The uninstall crashed... and left Windows unbootable. Yay. My Windows 98 installation (yes, 98) has been bulletproof for the last 3 years, but HP took it down.

After cursing out HP thoroughly and trying to figure out how to recover my OS, I decided to throw in the towel. I've been longing for a bigger HD for months, so I bought a nice 120GB drive to replace the previous 20-gigger and spent the rest of the day doing the Windows two-step. I've been able to pull a fair amount of data from the old drive and must admit that Windows is a lot snappier now than it was after accumulating 3 years of stuff.

And the HP 2610? I hooked it up via USB and it's working just fine. I didn't appreciate losing my OS for it, but I did end up with a bigger drive and a nice big spare partition for Linux (or FreeBSD). It could have been worse, I guess.

News for 02/07/2005

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