Comments on: What to do when hardware vendors stop updating their drivers

Find help for problem devices that have been abandoned by the companies that make them.

[BoardJIVE]

One thing to remember is the planning by manufacturers for product obsolesce which does nothing more that add more toxins to the landfill when people dump these.

I just recently had this same thing happen with a VERY expensive HP AIO printer, the 2840. As soon as Leopard was released, the printer could no longer be used for scanning, only printing. Talk about bricking a large product!

Finally someone yesterday found a work-around with the HP Director (culprit) and posted it to the HP forums. Guess what, it wasn't an HP employee. Imagine that.. The workaround was simply to click a button and enter the IP address of the printer versus letting HP Director find it via Bonjour.

The more the years go by, the less impressed I am with certain hardware manufacturers and HP is on that list. I used to consider HP a stand-up U.S. company but they are so quarter-to-quarter driven, they no longer consider peoples wallets or better yet, the environment with their consumable/obsolescence plans.

HP probably got my last dollar on printers and thats to bad since I'm the owner of the company... HP.. You listening? (crickets chirp)

[kdmann]

I find it ridiculously annoying at the lack of driver support for Windows Vista. Examples:
- I have a perfectly good HP NC8000 laptop for which HP has zero Vista drivers
- Pinnacle promised to provide Vista drivers for the Dazzle devices in March. Seven months later they came out and there are still no plans for Vista 64 bit.
- I've got several different web cams, all of which are now useless with Vista.

The list goes on, but you get the picture - built in obsolescence.

[thain1982]

It's kind of irresponsible to tell your readers to just not call tech support. Sure, if they bought from a crap company like Dell or HP it's a bad idea, but there are plenty of smaller resellers with domestic, 24/7 technical support with very quick response times. Companies like Power Notebooks, Xotic PC, Xtreme Notebooks, and Hypersonic computers all have very good response times on their technical support

[andrewbaggins]

We dumped HP years ago when we couldn't get a WindowsXP-compatible driver for our 3 year-old HP all-in-one. When I reached an HP executive on the phone he told me HP had no intention of "wasting any time" developing new drivers for "old" models. He suggested we buy a new printer and we did, but not an HP.

Our Canon all-in-one is quieter, printing costs are lower, and photo printing is superior by far.