My mother is the proud owner of an HP LaserJet 1300 series printer. She has also recently got herself a stylish Dell Vostro 13 something or other. As the computer expert of the family, a position I'm sure most of the few readers of this post will be familiar with, it's my responsibility to make product A and product B communicate correctly. The printer was to be shared from her old xp desktop over the wireless, a simple enough operation one would expect.
At first I just tried to add a new network printer to the laptop, windows kindly let me know that it didn't have a driver and that I would need to specify the location of an ini/inf file to continue. No problem, I was pretty sure windows had the drivers built in but clearly a trip to the HP driver support page was needed. Navigating to the page I wanted was easy enough, Google led me right to where I needed to be, here. Where I needed to clarify there were no letters at the end of my printer's model number and that I'm using 64bit windows 7. I'd like you now to go and see what you find on the page I found.
The page has three categories under downloads for this product: Driver - Universal Printer Driver Documentation, Software, Software - Universal Printer Driver. For those of you that don't know, for unsupported printers or for people with problems, HP publish a universal driver for their printers, this is apparently hell to install and I've not heard of it working.
Now, I'm not sure why there needs to be a documentation section in the part of the website clearly called "download drivers and software" and as most of it seems to be manuals for network admins there really is no good reason for them not to be in the section called "manuals".
Anyway, moving on we look at the lonely option in the software category, it's labelled "HP LaserJet, Color LaserJet, and LaserJet AiO/MFP Products - Print Driver Available in Windows 7". Turns out it's just a link to a notice saying the drivers for this product are built in to Windows 7. The other category, the universal driver, had only a solitary entry as well, an administrator resource kit, a file that I downloaded but did not contain the universal driver.
After what I would call a fairly major failure of the HP website, I turned to the only place a man could, forums. Eventually I discovered that in order to get the drivers I needed to plug the printer in via USB and click windows update on the driver selection page. This connects to a Microsoft server and downloads additional drivers that for some reason (they probably weren't ready) are not included in windows out of the box. I gave this a shot and after about 15 minutes of waiting a driver was found and installed. Time for the twist - it didn't work.
At this point I'd lost about 2 hours (most of it was spent navigating the HP website to make sure there wasn't another product page that could have helped) to this venture and was ready to try tech support. I'd like to note that the options menu for HP's tech support line takes all too long to get through. Once I got onto a human and explained my problem she checked the website to see if drivers were available and concluded, like me, that there were only support docs on the download page. She told me this meant I needed to wait for drivers to be developed or use windows drivers or the universal driver. I asked her to show me on the website, how to download the universal driver. It took about 10 minutes before she accepted defeat. Apparently I had to find another product, probably a newer one, that had the driver on its download page. I could then download that copy and install it as it works with all printers. She then remembered there was a new version out that had it's own page, I'd been here before. When you click through to the download page, it, like all pages before it, is filled with support documentation. Fucking Brilliant! In the end she emailed me a link to the driver I needed to download. It turned out to be the universal postscript driver and also turned out not to work.
So what has happened here? I have wasted a few hours of my life trying to solve a problem that should have taken 5 minutes. I've lost faith in HP's support site and it's designers.
A few small changes they could have made to save me a lot of time:
- If the product I'm looking at doesn't have a supported driver, that should be the first thing written on the driver page.
- Every driver page should have a link to the universal driver.
- Support Manuals should be in the Section of the site called Manuals, not in software and drivers.
What should you take out of this? HP makes solid hardware that, in the case of peripherals, can easily outlast the system they're bought for. I'd recommend buying their stuff new but be careful when purchasing 2nd had peripherals. Most of the business models have really good driver support as they are expected to be used for years to come but home/commercial products are given a low priority by the support teams.
