Exactly 2 hours and 47 minutes ago, my mom wanted to print something quickly from our HP Photosmart c3100 printer. So she hooked up her Vaio, but it started complaining about drivers. She started to panic, and asked me for help. I calmed her down, and navigated to the HP site to find the printer’s driver. Apparently there was a full package (do they even call them that?) and a basic one. The full one was over a 100 MB, and the basic was around 47 MB. I thought all I need is printing so it must be included in the basic package. I started to download and left it for around 45 minutes.
45 minutes later, I came back double clicked, on the installer, next, next, next, agree, next, you know the routine. To my amazement the installer was asking for more stuff from the Internet, so I left it and went back to my room.
20 minutes later, my little brother came and told me that the laptop was complaining and making noises. So I rush to check whats the deal. Apparently the automatic detection installer of Windows was minimzed and still running,caused a conflict, and aborted. So I just got rid of the multiple auto installers, one for the printer one for the scanner and one for god knows what, and started the installer again.
Another 20 minutes I went to check up on the installation and found another error dialog, of course with the customary “no explanation”. This time I had two options: Terminate or Debug. I opted for the former since I knew squat about debugging. This brought me a cute little error and a 1 minute countdown to restart! Arrrgh!
After the restart, I ran the installer for the third time, and thought while I am at it, let’s just browse the net for a while, so I click on the IE icon. The same error and the same countdown!
At this point my patience really grew thin, I rushed downstairs and got my eee PC, turned it on, hooked up the printer. I was expecting to have to manually add it from Ubuntu’s control panel. How wrong was I! it automatically recognized the damn printer, and started printing in less than a minute.
So let me get this straight, almost two hours **_ to get a damn printer to work on Windows XP, which didn’t even install I might add! This coming from the king of “_user friendliness_”, Microsoft Windows XP! While I experienced a 1 minute plug and play process for the king of _complexity**, Linux? Boy today’s standards are screwed up!