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Pyr_Pressure ,

Companies that force people to use their supplies are "bad companies"

Make good products with competitive pricing and your customers will use your supplies. Easy.

AceFuzzLord ,
@AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee avatar

Companies that act like their customers are an investment are the worst investment.

marbuka ,
@marbuka@wspanialy.eu avatar

@ChanchoManco once again I thank God I don't have to have a printer at home.
On the other hand, few of our work Laserjets will soon hit 20 years of service.

reksas ,

this makes me want to learn how to jailbreak hp printers and modify one to be able to accept ink from jerrycan via gardenhose or something.

intensely_human ,

Holy fuck it must be a slow news day. This is the third headline I’ve seen about this comment

GrayBackgroundMusic ,

I thought this was commonly known, but I keep seeing it all over the place. All CEOs think like this. Customer acquisition is a metric all sales departments use. Is it because he's saying the quiet part out loud?

intensely_human ,

It’s not even “the quiet part”. Like, it’s completely legit for a business to think in terms of business. Investment is, indeed, what businesses are doing.

meepmeep ,

Buying anything HP is a bad investment

lightnsfw ,

This has been known for at least a decade at this point. How HP still has a printer business I'll never understand.

meepmeep ,

Sadly there are a lot of people out there who buy things without doing any research whatsoever, and will just buy the cheapest printer that suits their needs

thebardingreen ,
@thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz avatar

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.

jay2 ,

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.

beefcat ,
@beefcat@beehaw.org avatar

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.

GrindingGears ,

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.

beefcat ,
@beefcat@beehaw.org avatar

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.

GrindingGears ,

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

odelik , (edited )

As somebody that's been working on computer hardware since the early-to-mid 90s, installing the drivers before connecting the printer was the norm. It was actually the norm for most peripherals. Just be glad you didn't have to do manual irq assignment. Hell, that is probabaly the issue, is that the driver installer borked the irq assignment when the device already had a handshake agreement with the hardware.

I digress though, this shouldn't have been the pattern for a modern printer in 2007, when PnP had been standard for several years at that point.

JustARegularNerd ,

I still have a early 2000s (I think that's the era anyway) LaserJet 2200dn and it's done nothing of that sort, even on my spare actual Windows XP laptop. Insanity that their more consumer brand printers had those problems by '07

jarfil ,
@jarfil@beehaw.org avatar

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:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3322513/how-to-reduce-windows-driver-bloat-remove-outdated-drivers.html

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.

timo21 ,
@timo21@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

@ChanchoManco I want one of those stickers for my car that says 'bad investment on board'.

Ganbat ,

HP anything is a bad investment. I bought a HP gaming computer because it was on clearance for less than it's graphics card alone, and learned that they lock the bios down to the simplest, most useless options.

belated_frog_pants ,

Fuck HP, buy a laser from brother or someone else. Anyone else but HP

rar ,

I fucking love my b/w laser printer. No bs, plug and print, nothing else.

danieljoeblack ,

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.

irongamer ,
@irongamer@beehaw.org avatar

Laser brother fist bump

atomicpoet ,
@atomicpoet@kbin.social avatar

I’m so glad I stopped buying HP products.

fxr0d ,

From my point of view HP printers are a bad investment.

This.

(A happy brother user, who regularly refills ink instead of buying new cartridges)

WHARRGARBL ,

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.

Ganbat ,

Their online tech support these days is no better. Just a maze of dead links and broken, 503-ing pages.

thebardingreen ,
@thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz avatar

Aside from the open and constant sexual harassment,

I wonder if they're still getting away with that in 2024...

emerald ,
@emerald@beehaw.org avatar

The worst part about HP is that I already have one of their printers but don't use it enough to justify replacing it 😔

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