Soapbox: Why I dislike HP consumer-grade software

By Bruce Preston

About eight years ago I bought an HP DeskJet 3600 printer.  It was a nice little printer and worked well.  Several months later my flatbed scanner and separate fax machine both stopped working, so I decided to go with an HP All-in-One printer/copier/scanner/fax machine.  I removed the 3600 and stored it in the basement.

The A-i-O device has worked fine, but I noticed that the system took a long time to boot, and I saw that HP had installed a lot of un-needed software, such as HP Image Director.  This is an application that monitors the card slots in the printer, or the scanner, waiting for you to put a media card in or do a scan.  It then offers to grab the image and direct it to an application.   Frankly, it’s a “pig”.   I removed what I could, then installed the “Enterprise” drivers downloaded from HP.  This removes the mechanism where you identify the target machine and application to receive the scan while at the scanner.  Instead of “pushing” the scan from the scanner, you have to “pull” it using TWAIN interface in an application.  Since the A-i-O is only about 3 feet away from my desk, that wasn’t a big deal.  All of the other functionality was still available.  That lightened up the resident software considerably.  But the machine still took 4:24 to boot to the point where it asks for Ctrl-Alt-Del. (My machines are in a domain.)

I lived with that annoyance for years, putting the machine to STANDBY rather than have to wait for the boot.  But now that I’m retired and have more time, I decided to track down the reason for the long delay during  “Applying Computer Settings” that other similar machines in my shop don’t have.

I eventually found that there is an even 3 minute delay while HPDJ.EXE is looking for a device driver for the printer that has been uninstalled.   I tried disabling HPDJ.EXE (it is in SERVICES) but that caused problems after the login.

I ultimately got the printer out of storage and re-installed it, then DELETED it from Printers & Faxes, and uninstalled the HP DeskJet 3600 software via Add/Remove Programs.  Even that didn’t work.

Next I re-installed, then used RevoUninstaller in ‘Advanced’ mode.  I didn’t let the HP MSI installer restart the machine.  Instead I let RevoUninstaller get rid of all of the registry entries and left over files that the HP MSI Uninstall had left on the machine..

The next boot got to the Ctrl-Alt-Del in 1:24.

This isn’t the only case of what I consider sloppiness.  My wife has an HP notebook that came with Vista.  We kept it up to date with SPs and critical updates.   It would restart on its own at arbitrary times – anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours after booting.  At first we thought that it might be a heat problem, but nothing showed in the event logs.  When we replaced the HP-customized Vista with Windows 7 the machine became rock-solid.   I suspect that HP had a buggy device driver that got replaced by a standard-issue one in Windows 7.



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