So here I am again at my friend’s place trying to get two HP printers to talk to a newly reinstalled Windows XP SP2 setup on — no less — an HP laptop.
I’ve tried the casual hope-it-prints-and-I-can-go-home-to-play-with-the-cat (not the pussy, which is another image entirely), but this has failed, and I’m in for the long-haul.
Okay, so job number one is to uninstall the software.
This is where things get funny; upon selecting “Add Remove Programs” I get the flashlight-of-doom. Hello?! This is a newly reformatted and reinstalled system! I expect the damn flashlight to appear on a machine that’s at least 6 months into its lifespan, not a scant month after reinstallation.
Then we get the laughably OTT warning messages from the software I’m unistalling.
Yes, I know it won’t work if I uninstall the software. Trouble is, it doesn’t work WITH the damn software.
Am I the only one who finds the increasingly doom-ladened messages from software laughable when uninstalling it?
If you uninstall this software, your hardware will no-longer function. Also, your dog, cat and first-born child will become agents of satan and impale you in your sleep with rag-dolls soaked in methylated spirit, and then set them all aflame to the chants of “Oh Satan, lord and Master, give us this day our daily toast.”
I mean, honestly, get a bloody grip.
So, while I sit here alternately scoffing a rather nice asian rice and vegetarian stir-fry thing (with battery bits which I am assured are not fish, but tamarind), typing out this blog entry and glancing upwards periodically to watch the mind-numbingly slow progress bar sliding across the screen like a glacier in the ice-age, I wonder why.
Why what you might ask?
Why HP is creating such dross these days. Why it’s so damn hard to get their own software — supplied with the hardware, and that supplied by their barely navagable website — to actually do something as blindingly simple as print a damn document.
If I had a dollar for every hour I’d been working on this stupid problem, I’d be on a beach sunning my dazzlingly gorgeous body (and you’d have a gorgeous bod after 23 days of Bikram Yoga, let me tell you) on a beach in Acapulco, while swarthy male men-folk fall over themselves to be the next person to serve me a blindingly alcomoholic drinky.
But then I wasn’t. I’m in Melbourne being fed Chinese. Which would be nice, apart from the fact I still don’t have this stupid printer working.
Ah, it’s uninstalled. Onto the next stage of my evil plan: clean-up the registry.
Except there’s two folders and neither of them are clear enough for me to want to take a risk of turning this PC into the doorstop it so resembles.
Okay. Plan B – there’s some sort of HP software cleaner.
ooo, a carrot. Yum.
Sorry, got distracted with eating while waiting for the HP site to load.
Oh and in another win for idiocy over common-sense, the HP tool which will tell me if I need to update HP software will only work on IE 5.o and above.
Like the bloody tax-office; what’s the obsession with Internet Exploder anyway?
But I digress.
Clicking the back button on the web page just repeats the same test and I get the same stupid message. Click back on the Firefox interface instead… Dumbasses.
Okay, another tack again: some information I’ve come acrosss suggests that XP Sp2 might just cause some issues.
So drastic measures are called-for: let’s frag Sp2!
Hmmm, still unconvinced those non-fishy bits *were* non-fishy bits.
On the whole though, a nice meal. And there’s my lukewarm peppermint tea on the counter, too. Hmmm, cold tea; just the way I like it.
While the SP2 uninstaller grinds on like all those people out there who still think saying “Luxury!” followed by some bizarrely inane comment is still funny after, what is it, nearly 40 years, I shall add this.
Several of my cunningly discerning readership have pointed-out that endless PC bashing is unfair to PCs as a whole, and that they’e had just as much problems with Apple Macs.
To this I say, I believe you; I really do. It seems that any PC that comes within coo-ee (an Australian vernacular term meaning “within spitting-distance”, which is far more gross than you might actually think) of this little black duck seems to pop a cog when I start using it. I was a feared systems tester in one of my former jobs for this very reason; my abilities to not just break, but pound and nuke-til-it-glows various pieces of software was legendary. All right, semi-legendary.
The point I am attempting to make is this: My experience with Macs makes me love and admire them as easy to get along with and rarely do they actually make me swear. My experience with PCs is as diametrically opposite to that of Macs that it might as well be in an alternate universe wearing a goatee beard and cackling wildly about what it will do with me come daybreak.
Maybe that’s not the best way to put the point. I’ll try again.
PC’s don’t like me. I don’t like them. When we’re in the same room it’s an unpleasant experience for both of us, and frankly we’d rather let the relationship shrivel-up and die than spend another moment with one-another. We have no shared assets, resources or small humans running around causing chaos; it was fun, but it stopped being that a long, long time ago.
Oh, look: the status bar has disappeared on the uninstaller, and we’re “running processes after install”. How spiffing.
Good grief, now it’s playing the glocenspiel at me! What’s that all about? One minute you get more talk bubbles than a bloody cartoon strip, the next minute you get two-tone glocenspiel going off like Mike Oldfield in a cyclone.
Okay, it’s now 8pm and it’s performing the cleanup. I don’t expect that to take seconds, do you?
Damn, no more food. But the tea’s still there.
w00t! It’s finished.
To restart your computer, click Finish.
Only too glad. Fingers crossed…
