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Previous: Box directions | Main | Next: Sprint billboard at Times Square, NY
December 24, 2005 12:03 AM
Broken: HP Printer box
Alan Selk writes in:
Printers do not ordinarily include paper or a connecting cable in the box, but this "Don't forget" notice on the box had me worried that my wife had bought a printer with no ink cartridges. Thankfully they were included, but there should a be a list of what items are included in the box with the printer.
Also broken: Even though the picture on the HP Printer box shows an odd-looking cable with a wide plug on one end, I was relieved to find that the printer requires a standard USB cable. They also need to update the picture of the USB cable to the current one.
[P.S. Merry Christmas from This Is Broken! Happy unwrapping tomorrow... may all your instructions be clear :) -mh]
Heaven forbid a multimillion corporation should include a cable that would cost them probably $3 wholesale. Several years ago, I worked for a national electronics retailer. Whenever I sold something that would need batteries, cables, or whatever, I would often give them to the customer for free - but only to the customers who were polite. The ones who were obnoxious, like let their kids run around tearing everything up, I would "forget" to tell them they needed a cable or power adapter to hook it up.
It's best to suggest you buy some cartridges with it so you aren't stuck with empty ink a week later when the underfilled ink cartridges they supply run out 10 minutes before you have to head to class to turn in your paper or that deadline approaches..
the usb pic is broken for sure.. looks like they are suggesting you but a cell phone sync usb cable with the printer LOL
Agreed--I always buy ink when I buy a printer and I always have a reload of the consumeables for any printer I'm dealing with. When the reload gets used it's time to get a new one.
FWIW, HP Printers do include a list of "what's in the box" somewhere on the labeling. At least, they did 6 months ago when I worked at Circuit City.
What's really broken are their drivers and useless apps!
The drive kept messing up detection and when it finally installed (after following lengthy instructions which involved deleting registry keys)... the progress indicator showed on average 2kb/s install rate for a multi-hundred MB drive and software (how did it get to big?) installation. This was on an Athlon 2400 with 512MB of RAM.
Needless to say, it took more than an hour for it to finish installing (it sped up slowly, but was still very slow).
Yue,
What drive are you talking about. Does HP make external hard drives. I can't imagine a printer driver would be over 100MB, also it sounds like you were downloading it. In general download speed is not processor/ram dependent but more a function of bandwidth.
I was installing a driver for my mother-in-law's printer on my laptop last week, and the HP website indicated that I had to download a 116MB driver! (You look for it, it's an HP PSC 1200) I took the trouble to find the CD at that point and let Windows find the driver, and it came out as less than 1MB needed to make it work.
HP Printers are pretty broken.
Oh - and the Comment form here is pretty broken... "Enter the number you see in the image below.", where the "number" is zxk58s.
What's broken is that ink cartriges cost more than printers with the ink included.
Also the printer software can be really messed up. When I was trying to install my (probably older than this one) HP printer, the software gave me literally 1 second to connect the USB cable before unspeakably annoyingly the progress bar actually went backwards. When I finally got the printer set up by ignoring the instruction not to plug the USB in before it asks, the software still thought the printer was uninstalled even though it worked perfectly and I got a popup every time I started my computer.
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Previous: Box directions | Main | Next: Sprint billboard at Times Square, NY
First!
Yeah, it's not nice to make people think they need to buy a cartridge when they already have one, especially with how expensive they can be.
Posted by: Mussorgsky112 at December 24, 2005 12:50 AM