[Xaositect]

To start, for those who don't know me, I'm an Onsite tech. In my company, I'm one of two who know Macs, and the other Mac guy doesn't know anything else, so I get all the cross platform calls.

So, I have a simple (Ha!) call - install a new HP 7410 to a mixed PC/Mac network. The 7410 has a built-in ethernet port, and the driver support, so this should be easy.

I started by setting up the printer. Then plugged it into the router, but locked it into a manual IP rather than leaving it DHCP so the address would not change. I selected an address in the same subnet, but outside the DHCP server range so no conflict would occur.

Install the driver on the new G5 with 10.3.6. 15 minutes. Works beautiful.
Install driver on Blue&White G3 (with G4(500MHz) card and two 120GB drives and DVD burner) with 10.2.8, took 20 minutes to install the driver. Works fine.
Installed to new P4/WinXP machine. 35 minutes, but works fine.
Installed to 1GHz P3 running Win2k. Maybe.

First time through, the install blows up (30 minutes, was at 10%). Machine will now not boot. Go through fixing it, get unit to boot, but the CD drives don't show up. They show up in BIOS, they even show up in Device Manager (which is kinda like system profiler, for those who don't use windows), but do not show up in My Computer, and will not mount discs. Finally figure out what happenned - the installer didn't like the CD driver, so moved it to the trash. Put the CD driver back in the System32/Driver folder, reboot, and CDs work. Run Installer in verbose mode, and when it gets to the point it crashed the first time, it instead puts up a dialog box claiming that the CD driver is from Roxio, and is incompatible. I check the driver file, it's from MS. I go to Google, look up the CD driver, and yep, it's from MS. Call HP, they say download the printer driver. So I do. It's the same. So, I start the machine with the CD driver in the folder, start the install, when it complains I take the CD driver out of the folder and put it on the desktop, finish the install, and put the CD driver back in the folder before the machine restarts at the end of the install. Install from CD took 1 hour 47 minutes. Total time to install the driver on the P3: 7hours 38 minutes.

I. Hate. Windows.

The G3 had more third-party upgrades and hobbled together stuff, so should have been the most problematic. Wasn't even in the running. The WinXP machine stopped seeing any printers the next day, requiring a second service call, and the P3 is just plain flakey now. Both Macs have no problems. the P3 had no additional cards than what it came with, except RAM which had been upped to 512MB.

I. Hate. Windows.

[AKcrab]

I hate windows, too.

[Scifience]

Sounds like my printer driver horror stories.

Only mine are with Macs, but it isn't Apple's fault. Five hours of tinkering CUPS and I finally get my PowerBook to print to my new Samsung color laser over the network.

I. Hate. Bad. Drivers.

[ManOfSteal]

I. Prefer. Them. Apples.

[DeathToWindows]

Originally posted by manofsteal:
I. Prefer. Them. Apples.

Windows. Can. Suck. My. Balls.

[ReggieX]

I have a good one for you. At work they automagically rolled out Photoshop CS to me and a couple of other people in the department, on Windows 2000. Now all my PDFs are associated with Photoshop and there's no possible way to change that since everything's locked down. Time to call friggin' Help Desk again...

[Spliffdaddy]

in the meantime..

right click/'open with'