On Aug 27, 2008, at 05:52, Peter da Silva wrote:
HP Photosmart Studio
Run away. Now.
I thank you both for the update; I myself haven't installed the HP
software in years and am happy to be able to strike a potential HP
scanner upgrade from my list of things to do without reservation. I
have an HP Scanner now, attached to a Windows 2000 machine that is
turned on almost exclusively for that purpose [1] and the
aforementioned several years ago, I installed the over 100MB scanner
software package to my poor Mac. In a word? Horrifying. The
proverbial straw for me was when the processor was pegged and I
couldn't find the offending application until I turned on "view
processes from all users" in the Activity Monitor and saw that
something with the letters "HP" in it was burbling away on the
*guest* account, which was logged in, but had lain dormant for over a
week. With a suicidal curiosity, I switched to the guest account and
saw a message-box-like window floating in the middle of the desktop
announcing ... nothing. No text in it. No close button either.
Nothing for it but shooting down HP processes like clay pigeons,
which was atavistically satisfying.
Un. In. Stall. It.
[1] That and the Ciclosport bike-computer software, which, though
having plenty of grippy edges to which gobs of hate could be
attached, redeems itself slightly by (A) having truly hilarious
direct translations from the German UI to the English one and (B)
actually accomplishing the tasks that it advertises, though in at
times quite circuitous ways not necessarily unrelated to (A).
--
Marco Von Ballmoos
http://earthli.com - Home of the earthli WebCore; PHP web sites made
simple.
