OfficeJet PRO 9018e (from COSTCO) fails repeatably on wired-only network

[Airedad]

NOTE: If anyone else has gone through this same problems-set and has found a solution which works I would greatly appreciate hearing it.  .... Thanks

This printer is "administered" from the ony Windows machine on the local network - everything else is Unix or Linux.  However taking everything but the Windows box and printer off the network does not help in the least.

About 14-18 months ago (I don't the date handy) my trustworthy Hewlett-Packard OfficeJet Pro 8500 A Plus finally died from overuse (I'd had it longer than I can remember - I think I bought it about 2 weeks after it was first released), and it had never given a moment's service except for one occasion when I had to replace one of the print heads.  So naturally I bought another HP printer (I've had about 9 of them over the years both at home and in the office) simply because they "just work". 

Well that was about to change.  At the time I bought it was still working for a company which allowed me to work from home if and only if I had NO WI-FI on my local computer network due to security constraints. 

Now there was one minor "gotcha" `with the printer.  Whoever packed it failed to include any documentation in the package.  So I went online, downloaded a "quick-setup" page (IIRC), and shortly after that had the printer up and running on the local internet, apparently without a whimper, having set the printer up to use a hard-wired network and having given it a static IP address. (FWIW, another security mandate from my employer was that the printer had to be able to access ONLY the local network and not the internet, and this was exactly the same setup as my 2 previous OfficeJets and the same as all 3 fof my InkJets.)

Well that lasted for a while.  However, after pehaps 2-3 weeks, I started getting messages on the printer saying that if the printer could not contact HP directly over the internet, it might stop printing altogether.  

This was an unpleasant note, and I immediately called HP support.  But the technician there told me that the message did not mean what it really said.  He told me simply to power-cycle the printer periodically and the problem would be taken care of.  (BTW: Surprise!  That turned out to be untrue.)

A few weeks after that, the printer started randomly failing to print jobs sent to it.  Again I called HP tech support and IIRC this time the technician had to get help, and again I was told to power-cycle the printer multiple times.... and surprisingly that seemed to work for a while longer.  But after about 6 months, the printer stopped printing almost completely. I would accept and print an occasional job, provided it was small, but larger jobs simply didn't print.

(I'm omitting multiple calls to tech support here because my dates are on a computer at my old office to which I no longer have access... sorry)

The above went on fro about 6 months at which point even the small jobs failed to print, AND the printer started failing its self-test.  So after another lengthy session with HP tech support, the woman who was helping me decided that I had a bad print-head, and she sent a new print-head set along with cartridges which came a few days later.

Much to my surprise the printer went back to working for a week or so.  Then it stopped printing ANYTHING.  The message says that I have go on-line to fix the problem, but (a) I am still am not allowed to let the printer have access to the internet, so that does me no good.

At this point I have advised all my friends (and the department I run) of the situation and warned them about this printer - and by association any HP "print-smart" (I think that's the term) printers, just to be safe.

This is sad: HP used to be a company which prided itself in building computers, printers, and the like which simply ran and didn't cause problems.

Now it may be said that I should have known about the requirement for WiFi , but in my defense there was absolutely nothing about that on the printer's box, AND HP happily provided the connector to use the hard-wired cable.  So since I did not receive the  usual documentation with the printer, I really don't think I did anything untoward here.  The real problem seems to be that HP now has a different approach: "Do it this way or you're wasting your money on a machine that won't work long. 

Do I sound bitter?  Yes I am.  I have considerable technical experience with computer and computer hardware as well as having added not a small body of code to many different O/S distributions. So it isn't as if I were someone who was computer-illiterate.  The problem I see is that it took long enough get to the root cause of the problem on this printer that by time I found the problem and learned the only possible solution, the return-period had ended and I was stuck with this lemon. 

If anyone else has gone through this problems-set and has found a solution which works I would greatly appreciate hearing it.