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Avon · Nov 6, 2002, 09:56 AM

Before you buy an HP Photosmart printer, I would like to share my experiences with one and Mac OS X.

I was using OS 10.1 when I bought my printer. The drivers worked like crap. The printer would mysteriously loose its connection every 2nd or 3rd print. To remedy this, you needed to reboot! Very frustrating.

Then came along OS X 10.2 and the printer drivers no longer worked at all! Thankfully Gimp Print and HPIJS soon packaged its drivers for OS X. They work pretty well, but the printer still looses its connection once every day or two�

HP finaly came out with drivers for 10.2. Of course as I expected they are total garbage. They bring my G4/400 to its knees and they take 4 times as long to print as the HPIJS open source drivers. When I emailed HP they kept on sending me these stupid suggestions like �Don�t print in landscape�. Well, what if I WANT to print in landscape! They didn�t help anyway.

In short, I have owned an HP Photosmart 1115 since its introduction and to this day cannot print form my Mac!!!!!!!!

I finally got frustrated with the whole ordeal and installed Windows 2000 on a PC and installed the printer on that. I am now able to print to the Photosmart 1115 by sharing the printer in Windows and using the HPIJS drivers via SAMBA and using the Gimp Print instructions�

Its quite unfortunate I have to go through a PC to print with this POS, but at least it works now. Needless to say, I am no longer an HP customer. I was really close to smashing this printer to pieces and mailing it back to them.

I really love OS X, if it where not for its open sourced subsystem this printer would be useless.

If anyone wants to make their POS Photosmart 1115 work then try the following�

http://www.linuxprinting.org/tylerb/hpijs/ (Great Driver for the 1115 included)

and

http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/ (No driver for the 1115 but excellent instructions)

(Note: Some do not have these problems and can print to this printer, but I know a few like myself have these mysterious problems. Either way, this is not acceptable.)

Leia Shoots Like a Girl · Nov 6, 2002, 04:34 PM

My Epson c80 works great with OSX from day one and the drivers came out in October of last year.

Avon · Nov 10, 2002, 08:48 AM

Am I the only person on the plannet that bought an HP 1115?

Does anyone else own this thing? If so, any problems?

X-Ray · Nov 11, 2002, 10:29 AM

My Photosmart 7150 works okay in Jaguar. Have you tried installing the version 2.05 drivers? They can be found here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/drivers/

Avon · Nov 13, 2002, 11:12 PM

Originally posted by X-Ray:
My Photosmart 7150 works okay in Jaguar. Have you tried installing the version 2.05 drivers? They can be found here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/drivers/

Yes I have. As you said they work OK but not good enough. They quit working after a few days. They also slow my machine down to a griding halt when its printing. Junk.

Its been about 2 weeks now printing via samba. I must say its really better this way. When i print It zooms the info to my pc and it takes over from there. My mac sees no printer load, I really like it. Too bad the PC makes so much noise!

passmaster16 · Nov 13, 2002, 11:51 PM

Why are you sending the print job th your 2k pc? You should be able to send the job thru USB to your 1115 or isn't there a gimp print driver for it? I swore they had one for the 1100 series. I was using that setup until i installed HP POS driver. Let me know maybe I can give you a hand if you want to try printing straight to the hp rather than the 2k queue.

-Josh

Avon · Nov 13, 2002, 11:59 PM

Originally posted by passmaster16:
send the job thru USB to your 1115 or isn't there a gimp print driver for it?

-Josh

HPIJS has one for the 1115. I used it with a direct USB connection. iT works for a while then you need to restart and reselect the printer for it to work again. Works better than the HP drivers but not as good. Now that I think about it, Im prettty sure this dropping of the connection is due to HPs driver that I still have installed. It is taking up so many resources! I bet its also bringing down my usb connection to it.

I am using the HPIJS drivers to print to the PC. I can live with this, its actualy very fast...

I urge everyone with an HP to uninstall thier drivers and use GimpPrint or even better HPIJS.

passmaster16 · Nov 14, 2002, 12:00 AM

yeah i would definately dump the hp driver if you using that other one. I think the driver constantly monitors the usb for activity and maybe the reason why you get disconnected.

Avon · Nov 14, 2002, 12:41 AM

Originally posted by passmaster16:
yeah i would definately dump the hp driver if you using that other one. I think the driver constantly monitors the usb for activity and maybe the reason why you get disconnected.

Yep, im pretty sure this is the problem and the HPIJS drivers would work great if i would have uninstalled the HP ones.

Either way the HP 1115 gets demoted to the PC indefinatley. Filthy whore.