state of the art user interfaces (pt 2)

(installs printer...)
this experience wasn't so bad. the instructions were pretty good, step-by-step for idiots. There were a few gaps between what was in the tute and reality (eg-there's two piece's of sticky tape on the base not in the tute and I can't figure out how to get them off), but no show stoppers in plugging everything in and inserting the ink cartridges.

It was obvious that the box team had been at the ink cartridges and internals as well, everything had guidelines and pretty pictures for the technically challenged (like me!), so that was a good experience. One thing lacking was some audio on the CD-ROM tutorial, as well as the ability for it to scale, the tutorial is a pre-packaged presentation about 600px by 480px that can't be resized, or rewound, so usability is a bit limited, but the content was good. pretty pictures and exploded diagrams everywhere.

The big failing wasn't the hardware though, it was the software. Installing the drivers was a bit of a pain as the supplied disks don't support Server 2k3, which is a bit retarded considering this is a mid-range network printer, and you would expect it to be deployed as a shared printer from a 2k3 instance.

Had to download the drivers from HP, the B+W & vanilla  drivers and install them manually. This took a couple of goes, but not because of HP. That'll be in a coming-soon blog.

Overall? It's a nice machine, very functional. can't comment on the price cos I wasn't involved in that stage. The most noticeable thing about it though, is that in operation it is *LOUD*! When you print you can hear every gear and cog inside grinding away and wheezing. This printer needs to be away from people or else it will drive them fair up the wall!! 

A close second is how slow it is, the quotes of about 7ppm is pretty close, if not a bit high, if you don't expect high performance then you won't be disappointed! ;-p

How I managed to separate color & B+W printing permissions will be in another blog...