Reply to: Massive printer driver

[Sysman]

Try universal printer driver from HP its a little lighter and if you have multiple HP printers works quite well.

I seem to remember that some of the HP printer driver team had done some open sourcee-stylee drivers, which also made it easier to share USB printers. This might have just been for Linux / Unix platforms though.

If you want to use a non-Windows platform for printing to HP printers, there is the Gutenprint project.

Do Apple make Printers?

Not any more.

[Sysman]

My PC came with Lightscribe. Has anyone actually used it?

Nope. I looked at the price of the discs you need and thought I'd carry on using my existing stock of discs and sticky labels.

Probably naive of me to think that HP would offer something that cost less than printer ink. I'd have another look at doing it if I were going to do some official looking distributions though.

[pmeswani]

I just installed an HP Deskjet printer at home, I de-selected all the gumph but was still left with a driver that required 348Mb of disk space!

WTF is that all about, why so much? Last time I installed a printer it wanted 5Mb max.

Do Apple make Printers?

[xoggoth]

My PC came with Lightscribe. Has anyone actually used it?

[OwlHoot]

I just installed an HP Deskjet printer at home, I de-selected all the gumph but was still left with a driver that required 348Mb of disk space!

WTF is that all about, why so much? Last time I installed a printer it wanted 5Mb max.

I remember the same a couple of years ago - The install went on, and on, and on, and on, ... I'm sure it took much longer to install then Windows!

I'll be looking for a decent double-sided laser printer soon, and I'll definitely go with Epson if they do one rather than HP.

[vetran]

Try universal printer driver from HP its a little lighter and if you have multiple HP printers works quite well.

[ASB]

I deselected everything but the driver, the HP site one was still 100Mb+.

I like the manual duplexing though.

They do offer a so called 'basic print and scan driver'. So I went to check, and yes 125mb.

[Sysman]

There's a big all in one HP jobby next to my desk at work. It doesn't half make a fuss when it's actually printing something.

Clank, whirr, shuffle, kerfuffle. Hey Look! It's Me At Work!

I use the non-HP printer in the hall instead

On another note, the worst Mac installation procedure I've come across in recent years was for a Lacie DVD burner. Presumably due to the LightScribe stuff, HP had got the job of authoring the installation disk and a real pile of cack it was. I ended up copying the lot to disk and modifying it to get it working. The drive itself is a nice piece of kit, but I wasn't surprised to see returns of that model sitting on the shelf the next time I was in any shop which sold them.

[gingerjedi]

You can download a driver only variant which doesn't install all the crud that goes with it

I deselected everything but the driver, the HP site one was still 100Mb+.

I like the manual duplexing though.

[ASB]

I just installed an HP Deskjet printer at home, I de-selected all the gumph but was still left with a driver that required 348Mb of disk space!

WTF is that all about, why so much? Last time I installed a printer it wanted 5Mb max.

You can download a driver only variant which doesn't install all the crud that goes with it

[Clippy]

On the disc that came with the printer or from their website, your should be able to download just the driver without all the other gumph.

[xoggoth]

HP? Start programs, tasks, IE addins, updates, undeletable directories in program files, loads of stuff in libraries, things in MS installer cleanup you can't identify. Never again.

[RSoles]

Not to mention popping up a warning message every time my laptop's switched on.
Ahhh! Ahhh Panic!, no printer! Ahh! Ahh!

It's a fscking laptop, the printer's five hundred miles away.

Another reason why I'm never going to buy another HP printer.

[d000hg]

Probably right. "Printer management suite" running in the background the whole time.

[AtW]

They install a lot of tulip these days, the driver is still 5 MB or maybe even less - additional bloatware is far more though