HP Software Really Sucks

I have the software for two printers installed on my computer. One is a Lexmark X85 and the other is an HP 6100 series all-in-one. Well, recently I was away from home and needed to print something. An HP 1400 series was available to me, so I decided to take advantage of it. But I didn't have the software. No problem, I thought, I'll just download it from HP's website.

That was no easy task. First I tried simply downloading the drivers, but after three attempts at installing them, it simply refused to find the printer and always hung on the screen where you are supposed to install the USB cable.

So I decided to download the complete program - all bloated 192 MB of it. No, I didn't really want or need HP Photosmart Essential or HP Solutions Center, but I didn't have much choice. I'd spent far too much time on this as it was. Their server was just about the slowest I've seen for a major computer-industry company.

As I'm installing the software - second attempt, by the way - it tells me I have an older version of HP's "all-in-one" software installed on my computer. Yes, this is for the HP 6100 series printer that I normally use. It gave me no options, but told me it was going to update this software and assured me my old printer would still work with it. Yeah, right!

I finally got the software installed and it recognized the 1400. As I expected, I noticed the 6100 was now gone. OK...I at least got to do what I had to do.

Well, today I tried printing again to the 6100. No surprise, total gibberish. It sent something to the printer, but what came out was nothing but a few lines of symbols, then a sheet with one line of junk on it, and so on. It was only a two page document. After about 10 wasted pages I managed to notice what was happening and cancel the print job.

This is just stupid programming. Why would the engineer assume by installing one model of their printer's software that I want to delete a different one? Or why wouldn't they simply make this magical "all-in-one" software compatible with multiple printers? That's the impression they gave me with the information boxes that appeared during installation, but apparently this is not the case.

Just to confirm that HP software totally sucks and their programmers are morons, I noticed a new icon on my desktop when all of this was done. It's a shortcut that consists of the HP logo and text underneath it that says:

get your downloaded software

I'm not quite sure what that means? But it gets worse. The popup text that appears when you place the cursor over this icon reads:

download your downloaded software

Yep, HP, you suck! Want further proof? Simply do a Google search on "HP sucks" and you'll immediately get about 2.5 million results! There's a heck of a lot of HP-bashing going on out there. Must be a reason. Must be many reasons. I certainly found a worthy one. Somehow it's comforting to know I'm not alone.