Printers and Windows just plain suck. The thing I hate is that the printer companies think that they have to make these super-fancy (meaning bloated and buggy) drivers containing stupid printing monitor applets that pop up whenever you print something to tell you how far the paper is through the printer. My roommates' printer driver even TALKS to you when you print something - annoying as hell!

These drivers always end up being a pain in the ass to install, and they're always full of bugs that make printing a pain in the ass. They also tend to break Windows printer sharing, although this is probably intentional because the printer companies want you to spend thousands of dollars on a business-grade laser printer before they'll let you share it amongst multiple computers on a LAN.

It really baffles me why they don't just stick to making a simple but robust implementation of a Windows printer driver. I'm sure that even novice users no longer care about some stupid status window or other buggy crap, and just want to be able to make the damned printer spit out their Word document or web page when they hit the print button.

There's my rant 😀

I agree totally with you. I have an HP Laserjet 1200 at home and I don't use HP drivers, but a generic PCL5 driver developed by Brother that prints faster and with slighty better overall quality. Damn HP could use some learning on how to program drivers.
And some Deskjet drivers are even worse.... 😳

PS - I am taking seriosly into account to install Linux on a separate partition. There are very good printers for my Laserjet as far as I know.

I use an Epson Stylus Color 760 ink jet, and installing it to use a USB connection is very difficult to do. You really need to know the ins and outs of Windows 98's Add New Hardware app to do it correctly. You must install it with one of three ini files, and the proper one is only hinted at. Otherwise it will default to the LPT port. Plug and pray, I was at my wits end last night when I had to install it to a fresh install of Win 98SE because I had work to print on it. Fortunately I remembered how to do it.

eL_PuSHeR: I'm sure if you spoke to Microsoft directly, the substance of their reply would be "Who uses dot maxtrixes anymore? Get with the 21 century eL_ChEaPo." The dot matrixes I used to have were noisy as a porn shoot and as slow as an old man's erection, but their print quality was clean as and they didn't suck ink as fast as a first class whore.

I think I should write a little "office comedy" entitled "When Printers Fail..." It starts when an intern is wrongly accused of breaking the office printer and becomes the object of fear and suspicion. His attempts to prove his innocence are as inept as his attempts to fix the printer. Eventually, his ostrasization from the employees combined with his own utter lack of self-worth and the hoplessness of the situation drive him to comit suicide by placing his head in the paper feed tray and pressing the print button. (Suspension of disbelief, folks!)

I prefer the scene in Office Space where they take revenge on the evil fax machine by driving it out to an empty field and beating the crap out of it with a baseball bat.

The newest cheap HP laser printers have huge drivers because the printers themselves don't have internal processors, and all the rastering has to be done in software on the host computer. (This also means they won't work in Linux. !@#$) Just be happy you've never had to deal with Lexmark printers, which, without a doubt, have the worst drivers ever (the printers themselves are also extremely cheap and prone to breaking). If your Lexmark drivers ever screw up (and believe me, they will sooner or later), your only option is pretty much to just reload the OS.

Epson Stylus CX6600. Now this is a printer. Bought it for my parent's for Christmas and I love it.

My Grandma has a Lexmark...and yes it talks to you. It sucks ass. It also doesn't print blue. Sigh....I'm probably going to have to tear it apart and clean it out. 🙁 (Already replaced the ribbon and tried the cleaning procedure)

My roommates' printer is a Lexmark Z45 color inkjet, which is the one whose bloated drivers talk to you whenever you print ("printing started" "printing complete").

I used to have a cheapo Compaq inkjet that was a relabeled Lexmark (don't remember the model number) that was a challenge to get working due to buggy, bloated drivers.

I've managed to avoid the need for a printer at home for a few years now. They'e essential at work, but we have a tolerable shared laser printer there.

The next printer I get is going to have built-in ethernet, and/or I will be purchasing a print server for it. 😀

I rarely print stuff for myself, but the kids need to for school projects. I either took my stuff to work or just printed to pdf and read on the computer after my HP LJ2P finally died last year after being in use since 1991 and the parts alone were more than a comparable new printer. I did without until school started and then got a cheap Canon i350 for less than $50. Black ink cartridges are only $6 for it and for the amount we print it does fine.

Yeah if I cared I'd probably get a low-end laser printer that is LAN-shareable. Not sure what I'd do about color printing though.

Who needs color anyway? Reliable monochrome laser printers are the best! Since the advent of high quality LCDs reading from the screen has become an alternative to printing.

I think massive propaganda should be made for less printing! I'm disgusted by people reprinting their entire 30 pages document after they've corrected a single spelling error. Good e-paper should become available, too. It's really kind of archaic to read computer print-outs.

I have a vision of a future society where WLAN is everywhere and you surf the net on you e-paper. No more USB sticks, they're also archaic. The future is the universal net. Periphery will be connected via standard net protocols and the tokens of the digital age like CDROMs and DVDs will vanish.

Enough derailing of this thread, though... 😜

I'd like a flexible "computer paper" book. It would have the same dimensions as a book with pages and whatnot but you'd download the digital version of the book from the internet to your "hardcopy", it would automatically format for the book. The book could also hold different copies of books. This would allow you to keep the old format with the ability to turn pages and whatnot without looking like that dork Jake Sisko on DS9 reading books on his pad. Man that would suck.

In fact this book doesn't have to have many pages. Mabye as many as 5, it could monitor page turns and progress to the next page or offer page numbers at the top. Man, we were born too early. 🙁

DS9 doesn't seem to be very visionary when it comes to books but other than that it's the best series ever produced!

I feel like starting a flame war, so I'll say that it's actually a toss-up for me between DS9 and Babylon 5 as far as story-arc sci-fi series go. I had to sit down and watch B5 in order from the beginning for it to make sense though, and although I think a lot of the characters and story elements were better, I think DS9 was paced better (I think because B5 was trying to make things happen a year at a time with the big conflicts happening mid-season instead of as inter-season cliffhangers)

I'm sorry I can't do anything to make this into a flame war since I've never wathched Babylon 5. It's always been on my agenda but the only time I've looked into it there was something with mages and I wasn't sure I was going to like that.

Yeah I felt the same way but decided that I should check it out because so many people have said that it's good. I'd recommend checking it out if you ever get the chance.

uhhhh, you must be thinking of Crusader. Don't. Forget Crusade. It sucked a$$. I think there were like 1-2 episodes with those mage guys in the B5 series. (I have the whole series on DVD.)

Watching B5 from beginning to end on DVD was amazing. I would do the same with DS9 but they charge waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much for their Star Trek DVD's. (RIP OFF!)

I haven't watched anything of B5 other than the main series, as I heard most of the other stuff is crappy.

Interesting thread twist. We started talking about Windows printer drivers and we have ended up talking about SCI-FI series. 🤣