Any HP Printer Drivers programmers hanging around here?
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This is most likely soapbox material. However... Are you guys completely nuts? I just installed a driver for my brand new HP Color Laserjet 2840. First: 300MB+ Disk space for printer drivers???!! Then these drivers seem to communicate a lot with the printer. Every 2-3 seconds they utilize 100% CPU time for .2 seconds. Whats that for? Who programs this crap? What happend with the good old printer drivers who dont consume more than 50MB Ram? I am thinking to give back this crappy product.... bb |~ bb
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This is most likely soapbox material. However... Are you guys completely nuts? I just installed a driver for my brand new HP Color Laserjet 2840. First: 300MB+ Disk space for printer drivers???!! Then these drivers seem to communicate a lot with the printer. Every 2-3 seconds they utilize 100% CPU time for .2 seconds. Whats that for? Who programs this crap? What happend with the good old printer drivers who dont consume more than 50MB Ram? I am thinking to give back this crappy product.... bb |~ bb
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This is most likely soapbox material. However... Are you guys completely nuts? I just installed a driver for my brand new HP Color Laserjet 2840. First: 300MB+ Disk space for printer drivers???!! Then these drivers seem to communicate a lot with the printer. Every 2-3 seconds they utilize 100% CPU time for .2 seconds. Whats that for? Who programs this crap? What happend with the good old printer drivers who dont consume more than 50MB Ram? I am thinking to give back this crappy product.... bb |~ bb
i had to kill some of that stuff for good, because whenever i'd play any games, it would kick me back to the desktop every five minutes. it literally took me years to find out what was causing that, but it turned out to be one (or more?) of the HP printer-status monitor things that was launching a window (but only for a split-second - i could never see the window except that a nameless icon would show up in the task bar and then vanish) to talk to the printer/scanner/cartridge-eater. and yeah, 300MB. and it wants to auto-update itself over the web and manage my photos. WTF? just print! Cleek | Image Toolkits | Thumbnail maker -- modified at 7:36 Thursday 27th April, 2006
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This is most likely soapbox material. However... Are you guys completely nuts? I just installed a driver for my brand new HP Color Laserjet 2840. First: 300MB+ Disk space for printer drivers???!! Then these drivers seem to communicate a lot with the printer. Every 2-3 seconds they utilize 100% CPU time for .2 seconds. Whats that for? Who programs this crap? What happend with the good old printer drivers who dont consume more than 50MB Ram? I am thinking to give back this crappy product.... bb |~ bb
The drivers for our office printer were 400MB and the stupid thing can't even do double sided without manually feeding the paper back in. I have no idea what they installed :omg: I know use the printer at the other end of the office. I get a little exercise and a change of scenery.:)
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This is most likely soapbox material. However... Are you guys completely nuts? I just installed a driver for my brand new HP Color Laserjet 2840. First: 300MB+ Disk space for printer drivers???!! Then these drivers seem to communicate a lot with the printer. Every 2-3 seconds they utilize 100% CPU time for .2 seconds. Whats that for? Who programs this crap? What happend with the good old printer drivers who dont consume more than 50MB Ram? I am thinking to give back this crappy product.... bb |~ bb
A few years ago HP lost their best driver devs and since then they seem to have been getting worse and worse by the day...and you just know 90% of that 300mb is to try and stop you refilling your ink cartridges etc. Fortunately (post Vista) the drivers are going to be user mode (not kernel) so at least the drivers won't bring down the whole OS. '--8<------------------------ Ex Datis: Duncan Jones Merrion Computing Ltd
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The drivers for our office printer were 400MB and the stupid thing can't even do double sided without manually feeding the paper back in. I have no idea what they installed :omg: I know use the printer at the other end of the office. I get a little exercise and a change of scenery.:)
For once, I think I can praise the office printer we have here. It's a TallyGenicom T8024 colour laser. It has a built-in duplexer. Connectivity is via network, USB or parallel port - we've got it networked, with the print queue on a server. It does 24 pages per minute (according to the specs, I've never measured it, and that's single-sided black-only I think). For anyone used to a cheap laser, you'll find one part missing. It doesn't have a waste toner bottle. It doesn't need one - it doesn't waste toner, only putting as much toner on the page as is actually needed rather than spraying it all over the place. It's done over 8000 pages now and hasn't yet needed new toner cartridges. When in power-save mode, it's actually silent. It turns all its fans off within a couple of minutes of finishing a print job. The drivers are only 15MB. Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
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This is most likely soapbox material. However... Are you guys completely nuts? I just installed a driver for my brand new HP Color Laserjet 2840. First: 300MB+ Disk space for printer drivers???!! Then these drivers seem to communicate a lot with the printer. Every 2-3 seconds they utilize 100% CPU time for .2 seconds. Whats that for? Who programs this crap? What happend with the good old printer drivers who dont consume more than 50MB Ram? I am thinking to give back this crappy product.... bb |~ bb
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This is most likely soapbox material. However... Are you guys completely nuts? I just installed a driver for my brand new HP Color Laserjet 2840. First: 300MB+ Disk space for printer drivers???!! Then these drivers seem to communicate a lot with the printer. Every 2-3 seconds they utilize 100% CPU time for .2 seconds. Whats that for? Who programs this crap? What happend with the good old printer drivers who dont consume more than 50MB Ram? I am thinking to give back this crappy product.... bb |~ bb
Sigh. Hewlett-Packard is your typical hardware company. They make great hardware, and think the software is something an intern can knock out in a day or two. The scary part is, the president / general manager / head cheese where I work now used to be an HP executive :~.
Software Zen:
delete this;
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This is most likely soapbox material. However... Are you guys completely nuts? I just installed a driver for my brand new HP Color Laserjet 2840. First: 300MB+ Disk space for printer drivers???!! Then these drivers seem to communicate a lot with the printer. Every 2-3 seconds they utilize 100% CPU time for .2 seconds. Whats that for? Who programs this crap? What happend with the good old printer drivers who dont consume more than 50MB Ram? I am thinking to give back this crappy product.... bb |~ bb
We got so fed up with HP drivers leaking memory (especially noticeable with our printing applications that run 24/7) that we switched to Lexmark - this was 5 or 6 years ago and the Lexmark drivers have been far more reliable (plus I can actually speak to - and get sense out of - their technical people).
The Rob Blog
Google Talk: robert.caldecott -
50 MB? Damn, even my biggest driver is only 120 k. The guy who wrote this junk needs a slapping. I'd take the whole printer back to the shop and reject it on the grounds of not being 'of fit and merchantable quality' Nunc est bibendum
fat_boy wrote:
Damn, even my biggest driver is only 120 k.
Are you slimming down, fat boy? ;P
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Sigh. Hewlett-Packard is your typical hardware company. They make great hardware, and think the software is something an intern can knock out in a day or two. The scary part is, the president / general manager / head cheese where I work now used to be an HP executive :~.
Software Zen:
delete this;
I wouldn't blame it on the programmers; it's the marketers and other management typess who feel that they need to Add Value by adding tons of bloatware to the system. I recently bought an MP3 player, and dutifully installed all of the software that came with it. Then I uninstalled all of it, after realizing that none of it was necessary - it just duplicated stuff built into Windows. And it was ugly and hard to use as well.
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I wouldn't blame it on the programmers; it's the marketers and other management typess who feel that they need to Add Value by adding tons of bloatware to the system. I recently bought an MP3 player, and dutifully installed all of the software that came with it. Then I uninstalled all of it, after realizing that none of it was necessary - it just duplicated stuff built into Windows. And it was ugly and hard to use as well.
Unfortunately I have an all-too-long experience with piss-poor HP support software. The bloatware I can ignore, since everyone does it. The device driver that won't install because the installation can't find its own files, the installation that BSOD's, the driver that won't let Windows delete jobs, and the driver that's slower than a teletype in January, I can't. I've found the best approach with HP support software is to take the CD, a ball peen hammer, and apply the latter to the former until there is no possibility it could be read. Then install the generic HP drivers supplied by Microsoft. While they may have been initially supplied by HP, at least they've been tested by the WHQL and provide a minimum level of functionality.
Software Zen:
delete this;