Hating computers Hating computers

Some days it would be easy to hate computers, or, in particular, computer companies and their software.

My latest problem is the installation of my new printers, and, in particular, the HP 2300. It is a big, slick, inkjet printer, which I picked up new for appoximately the price of the cartridges on eBay. Nevertheless, I have had innumerable problems getting it to work right.

I had it working on a parallel interface to my old server (#D). But then I moved it to my old print server, which I now have hooked to my network - with cables running everywhere and two of the five computers open right now. Getting the print server to run with a different name and IP address was a pain, but ultimately I prevailed. The big problem was that I was running on Win2K/XP, and the software was designed for Win 95/98/4.0. It did have the bad habit of dying most of the way through installation, and then when I ran the install program again, it would delete what I just did, forcing reboots in between.

But now to the HP2300. I do remember a lot of pain getting the parallel interface working. And, now I know that it would have been easy to switch to the printer server (you just switch to a different port in the printer properties). But that installation is long gone.

What happens is that the installation hangs most of the way through. When I say hangs, I mean that it is taking 90%+ of the CPU and won't terminate. I ultimately ran file monitor by SysInternals.com, and found that it was trying to get something out of E:\I386. I386 is, of course, the install directory for Windows (running on X86 computers - NT used to have versions for other architectures on its install disks too - I was involved with this when they dropped PowerPC). Of course, there isn't an E:\386. There hasn't been for years. That may have been where I initially installed Windows 2K on my old desktop (#D) from. Or, it could be HP's install path for its operating systems. I can't find any reference to it in the registry. Of course, I have changed the install path a couple of times in the registry over the last couple of years...

The printer installed just fine on my new desktop (#H) running XP Professional, and, it turns out, on the old desktop (#D) running 2K Server. In the end, I shared the printer from the new desktop (#H), and connected to the printer that way. I don't have total control over it from the old desktop (#D), but it does work...

Oh, and SysInternals' Process Exploder blows up under that OS (2K Professional) on that computer (#D), but not on 2K Server or XP Professional (#H).