William Stanek: The Dreaded Printer, Scanner, Fax Installation: Yes or No—The Adventure Begins (Part 1)
William here. Embarking on what I’d like to call “Adventures in Printer, Scanner, Fax Installation.”
On November 30, I did something I rarely do: I went shopping on Black Friday. Picked up some great buys on USB flash drives and SDHC cards and a fantastic deal on a HP Officejet All-in-one. By now installing new devices, hardware, and even entire systems is old hat around my house. One of my kids usually does the dirty work. Ah the benefits of the life of IT gurus in the making…not really but I’m sure you know how it goes. ;-)
The point is that the little experiment in All-in-One installation took a few interesting turns and the process to complete the installation might help you out as well. Set up of the All-in-One itself was pretty easy. Pull the machine out of the packing box. Put the pieces together. Start pulling off the blue tape holding things down. Pulling off one bit of blue tape opened the ink bay so the ink cartridges could be inserted, but the machine needed to be powered on for it to go into cartridge insertion mode.
When the machine was turned on, the display prompted for input language and then location. Easy enough for just about anyone. Most of the time. Right?
After inserting the ink cartridges and closing the door, the display prompted to insert paper into the paper tray so that the machine could print out a cartridge alignment sheet. Once this was printed, the device prompted to open the scanner door and insert the sheet that had just been printed. The device then aligned itself.
Quite a few steps to get through the setup but lots of good prompting. No more prompts after that though, so what was next to do? Well, the device is a wireless printer, scanner, and fax. Printer and scanner set up were done, so next up connect the phone line so that the fax could be used. The fax didn’t share lines with a phone or other device in the room, so connecting the phone line was easy. Connect the included phone line to the Ext 1 jack on the device and then plug the other end into the wall. Snap. Snap.
And that concluded the basic device setup. There was a lot more to it than it seemed. These devices seem to be getting more sophisticated all the time.
William R. Stanek
williamstanek at aol dot com