Why are your printer drivers for Windows so large and flakey?

[kyocera4eva]

We have a number of computers connected wirelessly to an HP Office Jet 8500A, I use the term "connected" loosely, if anything they are just in the same room, connectivity doesn't even come into the equation.  Here is a typical scenario that arises practically every day in the office.

(In Windows)

1.  Attempt to print.

2.  Printer doesn't respond

3.  Restart printer.

4.  Attempt to print again

5.  If the document now prints, that's all good but this happens less than 50% of the time.

6.  The document failed to print and now the printer cannot be found, go to step 1.  After 4-5 attempts proceed to step 7.

7.  Download latest printer driver

8.  Wait several days for the driver to download

9.  If haven’t died from frustration proceed to step 10.  Bear in mind that office bandwidth is highly expensive.

10.Reinstall, go to step 1.  Repeat ad infinitum.

11.Fire up Ubuntu virtual machine, then go to next section.

I think I remember reading this in the trouble shooting section of the instruction manual at one point but I might be wrong.  Anyway, so you might just be thinking that it's a problem with our Wi-Fi or some other transient networking connection right?  But consider the following,

(In Ubuntu)

1.  Attempt to print

2.  Printer isn't installed, install via friendly wizard dialog

3.  Printer driver downloads in about 4 seconds

4.  Print.

5.  Jobs a good'n’

6.  Laugh at Windows users currently in Office.

Seriously, it works flawlessly in Ubuntu almost every time, and when it doesn't a restart of the printer gets it working again.  So why is it such a chore in Windows, I mean you guys must of made (considering the download file size) Petabytes of drivers for your printers over the years and yet they still don't work flawlessly.

It probably wouldn't be so bad if there was an optional "tiny" driver to download for people that just want to print.  Does such a thing exist hidden away in your website?  If so please could you let me know where.  And by “tiny” I mean less than 20mb.

Consider this, which a colleague has just pointed out to me.  We went to the moon using the equivalent of a Commodore 64, yet I can't print a document in the same room as me using over 100mb of printer drivers over Wireless N.  Something isn’t right here…

Nick.

[8lives]

Nick is the firmware up to date on the 8500a?

Are you using a static IP?

[kyocera4eva]

Hi there!

Sorry for the delayed reply I've been snowed under.  I just tried to update the firmware via the control panel attached to the front of the printer and none are available so I assume it's up to date ot is there a possibility it might miss an update somehow?

[8lives]

Hi, as long as the printer has access to the internet the firmware updates should be up to date.

What version of windows are you using?

What is the model # of the printer? A910x

[kyocera4eva]

Windows 7, A901a I believe, although this doesn't seem visible anywhere on the device itself.  It's only Windows that seems so badly effected.  Everyone in the office has had issues with it.

[8lives]

Hi, have you looked at this HP link?

[vitormangraviti]

That's because HP tries to cover their cheap and horrible hardware with nice looking and "easy-to-use" software.

In the other hand, the opensource community focuses on workability - not big fancy rubbish.

Now that HP made their hardware even worse by getting these chips on their cartridges (so they force us to buy HP originals - which I manage to circumvent anyway), they need to make their software very flashy, so it wows the users and make them forget how bad their HP product actually is.

In Linux, all we want is ctrl+p and enter. Nothing else.