Some of y'all know how I feel about HP printers. Today was just another brick in the wall.
I had set up a brand-new HP printer for a client a couple weeks ago. It had no display and no visible controls. It had hidden colored lights that occasionally glowed in various preschool shapes from under the smooth, white, featureless plastic surface. Some of them turned out to be pressable, some of them not. There was no manual. You had to guess what the colors and shapes (things like X, O, box, and !) meant and/or did. The whole human interface was like a 2001 Space Odyssey nightmare crapshoot. But it's damning vice turned out to be that it couldn't print more than one page (of any stock) in a row without shredding paper. Eventually, the client took it back and replaced it, as I recommended. However she replaced it with another HP, as I recommended against. (The shop carried nothing but HP and Dell.) So today, I go out again to configure the new HP, and encounter a fascinating style of brain damage I have never before seen. This unit has a display touch panel, a much better interface. I push where I have to push to start the wireless configuration process. It throws up a bunch of SSIDs on the screen, and asks me which one of them I want to connect to. It shows me about six SSIDs, but none of them are my client's. My client lives in a new neighborhood prewired with CenturyLink fiber, so all of his neighbors have SSIDs it look like CenturyLinkNNNN, as he does himself. Well, I'm seeing for five of these iDs that obviously belong to his neighbors, but I'm not seeing his. I hit the refresh button, and I see more SSIDs, including some non-CL hotspots, but still not his. Yet I know his is up and working, because my iPhone and my clients equipment are all using it. And of course, he has the same router hardware as all of his neighbors, because it came with the new home. I log into his router. He has both a 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz AP with the same name, so it's not that the printer has only the wrong band radio card. The SSID is not set to hidden, and it shows up on my iPhone, I change the channel numbers on both, no improvement. I narrow them both down to a basic 20 MHz bandwidth, no improvement. I change the SSID name to something entirely different, no improvement (I change it back). Perhaps the printer's radio is swamped by the strong signal from an AP that is within a couple feet of it? I carry the printer to the other side of the house to see if that helps. No improvement. I turn on the hotspot on my iPhone. It shows up on the printer immediately. Finally I give up, find a long enough ethernet cable, and cable the damn thing directly to the modem. Not only do I not understand this problem, I have absolutely no idea how it could possibly be made to happen in an out-of-the-box product. But obviously, if anyone can do it, HP can! _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] https://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
