We brought home our new HP Photosmart Premium printer two days ago. It prints, scans, faxes and copies. Pretty cool. We installed the DVD full of software that came with the printer (and it was an immense installation). We tested the printer, but our new printer ate the copy paper. It chewed it up and ruined it. Bad start.
OK. Even good companies sometimes make defective products. It doesn’t mean that the design is bad. Sometimes it’s just an isolated bad machine. Therefore, I exchanged it for a new printer of the same model: HP Photosmart Premium printer. This one printed very nicely, including the printing of photos on special photo paper. Quite impressive.
That evening, I noticed that I could no longer delete files on my computer. A prompt popped up saying “C:\ is not accessible. Access is Denied.” I checked my file permissions in Windows and they looked to be in order. Even though Windows 7 indicated that I had full permission, I was not being allowed to move or copy or delete files. I could could use my files, however. Then I noticed that every time I started a program, the Windows installer popped up and caused a significant delay.
What was the last thing I did before these problems? I had installed my HP Photosmart Premium printer software–it is a long install, puzzlingly long. But the printer worked and it seemed like too much of a coincidence to blame HP for this corrupted Windows system.
Bigger problem: How do I get back full use of my computer? I had a backup that was about 10 days old (I use ShadowProtect Desktop [1], which is excellent full metal backup/restore software). My corrupted version of Windows 7 wasn’t allowing me to copy my newer files from my machine– I was denied access. I found, however, that Windows Easy Transfer [2]software did allow me to save my current files (This is a utility that comes with Windows 7. It was still on my machine from my recent install of Windows 7–the installation of Windows 7 from XP is another separate frustrating adventure that sucked about 2 work days out of my life, though Windows 7 does seem to be an excellent platform) . Bottom line with regard to the access denial problem: I was forced to spend a full day trying to get my computer back using my 10 day old restore plus the updated files I squeezed out of my machine.
As soon as I had my computer working again (and this required two hours with a computer consultant to figure out all of the various issues and spinoff issues —Thanks to Andy Wahl [3]), I did a full metal-to-metal backup again on ShadowProtect. That was completed about 20 hours ago.
After I got home from work today, I decided to reinstall the HP Photosmart Premium printer. My mistake. Immediately after installation of that software, I again lost most of my permissions regarding my C drive. Exact same problem as before. Now I will need to set up a restore (after driving to work tonight, where I dutifully deposited my external backup drive this morning, trying to keep a copy off-premises). I will now lose several hours of productivity. I am angry at HP for putting out crappy unnecessarily complicated software loaded with unrequested promos. Thank you, HP for locking me out of my own hard drive.
Beware to anyone buying the HP Photosmart Premium printer: Do not install the software that comes with your printer. Instead, Andy recommends that you go to the HP site and install only the basic drivers for printing/scanning. Or, if you decide to pop that tempting printer disk into your DVD drive, don’t do it unless you have a full system backup waiting in the wings.
I am now finished writing this post about the defective software that comes with the HP Photosmart Premium printer. I’m hoping that I don’t need to write anything further about the defective software that comes with HP Photosmart Premium printer. If you installed the software that came with your HP Photosmart Premium printer and it’s working, congratulations. I hope that I can save others trouble with this post.
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