HP printers & FreeBSD?

[K. Gunderson]

On Mon, Oct 04, 1999 at 04:43:48PM +0100, Scott Mitchell wrote:
> Having given in to my SO's nagging and decided to buy a new printer, my
> next task is to make sure it works with our favourite OS before handing
> over the cash... The printer in question will probably be from HP simply
> because I've never owned/used one that gave me any trouble, whereas the
> same cannot be said for certain others :-(  Anyway, looking through the
> specs for the current crop of Deskjets, many of them apparently use
> something called 'Printing Performance Architecture' -- these also seem to
> be the models that don't even offer Mac support, so I assume the 'Printing
> Performance Architecture' is some kind of poxy WinPrinter thing that is
> best avoided.  The rest of the range talks PCL Level 3 which I believe is
> fine for tools such as GhostScript et. al.
> 
> Any confirmation that these are valid assumptions would be appreciated.
> Please cc: to me as I'm not subscribed to -questions these days.

I have a Deskjet 660c that I bought several years back for a Windoze box
and based upon my experience with both it and HP, I will never buy another HP
product as long as I live.  

First off, the drivers for this puppy have
always been sketchy and HP was slow to offer a working WIn95 solution
resulting in frequent PITA's.  There were also a couple warranty issues
that HP refused to honor.  The printer came with a 3 year warranty.  I
called HP to get it sent in for service and they refered me to some
outfit in San Diego, despite the fact that I can walk to their Boise
offices from here in 5 minutes.  The San Diego outfit gave me the run
around, and after a bunch more effort with HP phone menus, I was told to
take it to the local CompUSA.  So I drive it down there and they inform
me that the unit only has a 1 year warranty, despite me showing them the
side of the box where it clearly denoted 3.  The CompUSA manager
calls HP to verify, and is informed that the unit only has a 1 year
warranty.  Go figure. By this time I had no desire to spend a few more
hours trying to get a live human at HP and gave up.

So hey, screw me once shame on you, but screw me twice shame on me.  My
advice to anyone who asks is to stay away from HP since once they get
your money in hand it's the last service you'll ever get out of them.

-- 
Ciao--Ken
http://www.y2know.org/safari

Failure is not an option, it comes bundled with your Microsoft product.