computer frustration

Frank Fusco

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Mountain Home, Arkansas
Yesterday we had a local professional geek come to the house to basically 'clean house' on my wife's computer. :type: While here, she did some clean up on mine also even though it was in good shape.
After leaving, I uninstalled the printer on wife's 'puter and began installation for a new one, a Kodak. Install took a long-long time. Then, when the instructions said to, I connected the USB cord and clicked 'next'. The program did a search for the new printer but came up saying it was not connected. Tried several times, wiggled connections, said all the correct dirty words, held mouth right, etc. Still to no avail.
So, right now, I am reinstalling. Has been 'installing' for about an hour. The loading bar said "2 minutes remaining", now it is saying "13 minutes remaining". That notice has been up for about half an hour. And, I'm not optimistic that, even with a new USB cord, the program will recognize the printer being connected. :bang:
 
Do not know if you have tried this trick but shut the whole system down and restart the system up after being off for about a minute. Do not do a restart but a shut down. Once the PC has restarted, turn on the printer to see if the PC finds it. This may not fix it but it is an easy item to try and sometimes in a double blue moon all will be well again.

Good luck

Mark
 
LOML has an HP All-In_One. The instructions even said the discovery process could take up to 45 minutes!!! It took an hour. Patience is a virtue; I interrupted the thing 3 times because I thought for sure it must be stuck. HP tech support was helpful in that they said the install program stinks and takes about an hour ;-( I liked it better when memory was restricted and storage was expensive. Programmers had to be efficient. Now many products are a sloppy mess.
 
Do not know if you have tried this trick but shut the whole system down and restart the system up after being off for about a minute. Do not do a restart but a shut down. Once the PC has restarted, turn on the printer to see if the PC finds it. This may not fix it but it is an easy item to try and sometimes in a double blue moon all will be well again.

Good luck

Mark

Oh, yeh. The old reboot trick. Did it several times.
 
What system are you running Frank? Vista?, XP? I can ask my kid about the problem as he is my computer guru and was one of the head computer techs at future shop. He might have some suggestions. I know i just hand everything off to him now and let him deal with all the coputer problems. Unfortunatly he just moved out and i have to book an appointment to get him to look at my system now.
 
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Did all of above, and more. Spent about four hours with a tech support guy, you know the kind. Never did get it working. Line finally went dead. That was my excuse to pack it up and return.
Saw a Lexmark that looked nice, and they have a reputation for good color printing. But, cartridges were about 25% smaller than HP and cost $10.00 more.
I don't want to go back to HP because we are replacing a two year old printer that they have discontinued cartridges for. I ain't happy with them either.
Will check out Dell in the a.m.
 
When I got the Mac Mini, I hooked up all the wires and cable there were hooked up to the PC laptop it was replacing, and installed the KVM switch, so I could share the Keyboard, Video (monitor) and Mouse with the shop's window's computer.

A couple of days later, when I was finished entering the tobacco order on the Mac Mini computer, online, I realized I needed to print out the confirmation page.......... :doh:

Oh heck, I'd not installed the printer on the Mac Mini yet :(

My experience up to that point is similar to yours Frank, installing printers can be a real time waster.

I opened the "System Preferences" on the Mac Mini went to the "Printers" section, and much to my surprise the Brother MFC7420 was already installed, ready to go :eek:

It printed the tobacco order without any problems, what did I do to accomplish this..... :huh: :huh: :huh: :dunno:

All I did was plug in the USB cable, and Bob's your Uncle, the printer was installed :wave:

Just one of the reasons I'll not be putting my hard earned cash down on a new Windows machine for the foreseeable future :wave:

Sorry, I'm not trying to rub anyone's nose in anything, I'm just showing how it "SHOULD" work, I'm very positive that Mac has issues with some stuff too, but it has been 9 months now and I've not found any really big problems :thumb:
 
The best thing to do is skip using the install cd's as they usually have a load of crap programmes it will install as well. Just go to the mfr's website and download the drivers for the particular printer and then run that file.
 
The best thing to do is skip using the install cd's as they usually have a load of crap programmes it will install as well. Just go to the mfr's website and download the drivers for the particular printer and then run that file.

Tried both two times each and with the 'help' of the guy from India.
My misteak was not returning it yesterday and saving a day's work and frustration.
 
I can't confirm, but I think Lexmark is an IBM printer... I had one of their cheapie's a few years back... the ink cost more than the printer, but worked okay.
I have a Dell computer and am not happy with it.... it has a very loud fan motor that sounds like a small Cessna getting ready for take off... I called Dell Support and go Michael in Mumbai... first words out of his mouth.. "you need to format the hard drive and reload windows"... yeah for a hardware problem. And it tends to hang up if I get too much open and working at the same time. My son was up this past weekend and looked at it.. he said most likely, I need more memory.. only have 512 and the CPU is having to work too hard... will try that.
Back to the printers..
If your computer is relatively new, it probably has the drivers for most printers already... I use an EPSON C84 that has worked great since I installed it back in 2005... The wife uses an HP C8250 and it works great, except the photo print part... the cat knocked a glass of 7-up over onto the printer and it soaked the photo paper holder... I've cleaned the printer several times, but it's still sticky I guess.. the photo paper won't feed.. not a fault of the printer, just goes to prove that cats, 7-up and computer printers don't mix well.
 
It is a several years old Dell my wife uses, it has XP, which is sorta OK.
Things like this remind me to try to not become too dependant on computers. Hard to avoid these days however. Hate to admit that.
I keep the ink pot and quill pictured on top of my computer tower as a reminder that what the mind of man creates does not always require a computer. Great things were done 'back then' with much less. Martin Luther wrote over 500 books with a quill pen. I put that up there with my first computer, more than 20 years ago.
As for the new printer. I'm going to sit back and take a deep breath then make a decision later. In the meantime, wifey can e-mail me whatever she wants printed and I'll do it. She could use the thumb drive I gave her....but.....that's another story.
 

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Well if you return it, don't buy a lexmark. absolute junk in mumble opinion.

Epson or HP. The only problem I've ever had with an HP, wifes cousin was printing out some stuff and it picked up a sheet crooked. She grabbed it and pulled it backwards. It trashed the drive unit. Called Hp told them what happened, after trying a couple things they shipped me a new one along with shipping label for the return of the broken one,

AS for Dell, the don't build all of their printers. My nephews new one is a re branded HP ;)
 
Frank...

A few cents in the opinion pot. I agree with Glenn...software today is a sloppy mess. When I started we coded in assembly language (yeah, that was a long time ago), because memory was limited and expensive. Then along came "high level" languages like Fortran, PL/1, Cobol, C, etc. Quicker to get something running, but you could write an assembly language program to do the same thing in half the memory...and of course it would execute faster, too. The marketing types don't like that, though...get it out the door. Now there's Visual C++ and I don't know what else...you almost have to have a Cray and more memory than G just to get past the inefficiencies that those compilers generate. As an old school machine language guy that was always hard for me to swallow.

I use XP...on purpose. Someday, when the pioneers aren't getting so many arrows in the back, I may go to Vista...but it probably won't be Vista then, will it? Well, XP does what I need it to do and I know how to find things when I need them, so why change and labor through yet another learning curve. Time was when that kind of stuff was fun, but now I just want the bloody thing to work and not give me grief.

As for peripheral drivers, there are usually three choices..
1. Let Windows find the device and install the driver. These drivers have been provided to Microsoft by the peripheral manufacturer, so they will probably work, but they won't have the latest bug fixes (and every piece of software released today has more bugs than you could believe). They probably won't have the latest features, either, but you may not care about that.
2. Install drivers (and only the drivers...I agree with Patrick on that) from the included driver media (DVD, floppy, etc). But those probably won't be the latest either.
3. Go the the manufacturer's website and download the latest driver release and install that...once again, drivers only. This is what I always do.

Here's something to realize...if Windows has an embedded driver for your peripheral and the peripheral is turned on and connected when you boot, Windows will find it and install the driver originally provided by the peripheral manufacturer unless you tell it to do otherwise. Not always a problem, but an easy way to do it if you have a current driver download from the mfrs website is to leave the thing turned off. Once Windows has booted, turn the peripheral on and double-click the exe (or whatever it is) and let the driver install itself. Now, this doesn't make up for crappy driver install software, it just ensures that the driver that's installed is the current one.

I simply can't understand a driver taking an hour to install. I've seen some really bad software, but that has to be a world record. Here's something else...if there's a bug in the hardware, say a part that doesn't function correctly, that's usually not hard to fix, but it takes a long time for the corrected part to start flowing off the assembly line. But a software bug?...change a couple lines of code with an editor and bada-bing. Shame on HP.

I use Epson for my grunt inkjet. Cheap, and 3d party ink guys make cartridges for most of them (I use Carrot Ink). The inkjet printer mfrs make money on the cartridges...no secret...so they practically give the printers away. So why not use a brand that has good after-market cartridges available. Now for my photo stuff I use a Canon and only buy Canon cartridges...different ballgame...should have at least 6 colors and the cartridges are not cheap.

I agree with the comment about Lexmark. They used to be good.

Good luck.

Cheers
 
Things like this remind me to try to not become too dependant on computers. Hard to avoid these days however. Hate to admit that.
I keep the ink pot and quill pictured on top of my computer tower as a reminder that what the mind of man creates does not always require a computer. Great things were done 'back then' with much less. Martin Luther wrote over 500 books with a quill pen. I put that up there with my first computer, more than 20 years ago.

As an old Newspaper man, you'll remember Art Bucholtz... he once said
"Computers makes it easier to do lots of things... problem is, these things probably don't need to be done."

AS for Dell, the don't build all of their printers. My nephews new one is a re branded HP ;)

It's my understanding that Dell really doesn't manufacture anything... they assembly units from components from all over... If I could go back and re-buy my computer, I think I would go back to the E-Machine... I had one at work that ran Millenium of all things and never had a single problem with it in all of the 6 or 8 years I used it. I was linked through an interface to the company's main frame that ran unix, and to the U.S. department of commerce through the internet... I preferred windows 98 to XP, but the I've gotten used to the XP so it works okay for me now.
 
Do I shoot myself now? Or shoot my wife?
I discovered yesterday that my wife is getting some very questionable computer 'help' from someone else. I don't know who.
She had a little glitch yesterday and was advised to do a restore. So, computer is back to where it was before I paid the professional geek for two hours work. I'm through. Will never touch that computer again and am going to password protect mine today.
 
Frank, that just might be a good idea.......... the password protect thing ;)

Here, watch >> THIS << and imagine the computer you are frustrated with is in the mix..... :D :thumb:

........ feel better now :wave:
 
Frank...

I've been saying this to people I know who have this kind of problem for a long time, and it always seems like I'm shouting into a hurricane. But here goes. Look into Ghost. Make your own recovery images, and make them as your system changes. Then when something goes wrong you don't have to fallback so far. My preference is Ghost 2003 if you can still get it (should be 30 bucks or less), because it runs in DOS mode (last version to do that) so Windows is totally quiescent when the image is made. With Ghost I can restore my C: drive to the latest image in about 15 minutes, as opposed to spending 2 days reinstalling XP and installing all my applications and getting their preferences set the way I want them (and boy, ain't that a lot of fun). Another way I use it is if I'm going to install a new app or a new driver I first make an image, then if something goes wrong in 15 minutes I'm back where I started. I can either try again or give up and all traces of the problematic software are gone (no cowflops left lying around, particularly in the registry).

Cheers.
 
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