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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Hp Printer Misbehavior

bughunter - Aug 20, 2005 - 11:53 am

I'm hoping you have answers to some of my most vexing questions. I bought an HP 7960 photo printer for my wife, since HP was in Fry's hawking them for $99 apiece. It has never worked right.

Why are HP print drivers so bad? Why is HP tech support so bad?

Why does my HP photosmart 7960, when I send it a 4" x6" image, tell me that it detects 4x6 paper in the paper carriage, and that I must remove the 4x6 paper and put in 8x10 paper?

Why does the "HP Communications" process go berserk and suck up every available CPU cycle, so that I come home from work and my iMac G5 is awake and fans are going full speed?

Is there another driver I can use?

I have an iMac G5 1.8 GHz with 1GB RAM, running on Mac OS 10.3.9. The only devices I have connected to USB ports are keyboard, mouse, an extremely well-behaved Samsung Laser Printer, and the itinerant HP 7960 inkjet.

Thanks,

Rick Cross
Pasadena, CA

DeltaMac - Aug 20, 2005 - 12:11 pm

There is some updated drivers to download from HP web site, Have you tried that? http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/s...n&cc=us&os=219

The HP communications software is sometimes a bad player, but there has been some improvement with newer driver versions. Perhaps that can help you. The download is really large - about 95MB - I hope you don't do this with a dial-up connection.

If the updated driver is no help, you CAN remove the HP communications part. It's really only to allow the computer to respond when you press the buttons on the printer, so that functionality would be turned off. Hopefully the update will help you...
- Dale

bughunter - Aug 22, 2005 - 8:46 pm

Thanks for your reply, Dale.

I had to wait till I got back to work to download the new driver installer since Safari keeps stalling on large downloads.

I will install tonite and let you know how things work.

How do I "remove the HP communications part?"

Rick

DeltaMac - Aug 22, 2005 - 10:16 pm

It's in your startup software, and should be able to delete from there. If you try the updated drivers, that may behave better.

- Dale

bughunter - Aug 23, 2005 - 1:02 am

Dale,

The printer behaves much better now. Thanks for the tip on the driver update.

(I'm sort of embarrased it was updated the day before I submitted my first request. I had checked a couple months ago and found nothing.)

Anyway, if there are any performance issues with HP Communications I'll let you know.

Thanks,

Rick