Even HP's cheapest printers are now wireless and best used that way in my humble opinion 'cause who wants a printer wired to his physical host any more? And who wants his whiney daughter moaning, "Daddy, I can't print out the Internet because your computer's turned off."
Well, sadly, the Windows installation doesn't seem to work: it can never find the thing at the end after installing the drivers. So, just skip trying to make the software work—it won't and I spent a couple of hours with the HP support weenies this afternoon just to prove it. It bugs me that I can't figure out why it fails.
However, the installation does indeed install the drivers on both Windows 7 and XP. So, even though you have to abort the installation seemingly without setting up an actual printer, you can do that afterward. Once that's done, you just print to it as if a "local" IP printer. Check out my note here on how to do that on XP, the harder (interface-wise) of the two platforms to do it on.
Actually, this is an activity that takes some of us way back, but it's a nice refresher for those still basking in the sunlight of Windows XP, the last trustworthy operating system Microsoft ever sold.
It all works perfectly as long as your printer lives on your LAN. I even tried hooking up to it via my Linux host which was, as usual, easier by far than using Windows 7 or XP.
I did not try the old-fashioned USB cable route. I don't ever want to do that again.
Scanner and other stuff
And, if it's not recognized by my computer host, how ever to use the scanner?
Ah, well that seems like an obstacle, but there's a solution.
First, I've not used the client software to scan with anyway, so I can't compare.
But, knowing that all sorts of things regarding this device are accessible in my browser via http://192.168.1.109 (where I pegged it with a static IP address), I just went there to do some scanning. It worked nicely and I'm not real sure that I'd miss the proper, client interface even if it existed.
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