Stubborn

In the last week I have reduced the number of printers in the school by six. That may not seem like much, but bear in mind that no-one has gone without as a result, and you begin to understand the reason why we have been spending so much on consumables. We have printers coming out of our ears.

All of these now-retired printers are HP. Which leaves me with a happy feeling inside.

What does not leave me with happy feeling inside is that every time I have gone to remove the various bits of HP software from the workstations, I have ended up having to resort to Autoruns, the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility, and hard file deletions to get rid of them after the uninstall programs largely failed to even run, let alone do anything remotely resembling an uninstall.

Did you know that the HP Deskjet D2460 software CD installs more than 20 component pieces of software, only 2 of which have functioning uninstallers, and most of which are completely hidden from Add/Remove Programs entirely? This is the sort of ridiculous obscenity you only truly learn about when you have to start digging through said obscenity in a titanic struggle to pry your computer from its slavering, undying jaws, the obsidian tendrils of its CLSIDs clinging desperately to the last remaining vestiges of its sundered registry keys.

Today I installed what I intend to be the first of many Xerox colour laser printers in the school. The driver download was a grand total of 2.6MB. By comparison, the smallest driver download for the D2460 is 36.0MB.

THIRTY-SIX MEGABYTES. For a DRIVER.

Guess which one of these printers works better?