June 17, 2004
hp tce sucks
update (9-Sept-2004): I wrote the below one day when I was feeling particularly annoyed. It’s dangerous to be commenting about your employer on the internet, but hey, I lead a dangerous life, ok? For the completely dense, let me spell it out: I work for HP.
The good news is, I can probably help you. So if you found this page because you had a bad experience with an HP product, please let me know either via email or by leaving a valid email address in your comment, and I’ll try to turn your crappy customer experience into a good one.
Warning: nerd rant follows.
Sorry HP, but I just had awful TCE. For those of you out there who don’t work at HP, that stands for Total Customer Experience. It’s supposed to be one of the company’s most important metrics.
I bought an HP ScanJet 3500c and wanted to hook it up to my Mac — a G4 cube running OS X 10.3. The software included on the CD didn’t work, so I had to go download the updated drivers off the HP web site. Fine.
Well, not really. The drivers I needed were 171 MB. Yes, one hundred and seventy fucking megabytes of shit just to get a scanner to work. Now I’m not an apps guy. Most of my work is in kernel land. But I’m pretty sure that writing a driver for an OS shouldn’t result in a 171 MB binary.
Whatever. I downloaded the thing (thankgod for broadband, it only took an hour) and tried to install it. Jesus fucking Christ, the install quits all your running programs AND reboots your computer. Hello, HP! OS X is unix! You shouldn’t have to reboot! Ever! And stop fucking with other processes! Closing iTunes so I had to sit in silence while watching your crappy installer copy about 4000 files sucked ass.
So yeah. Good job, guys in HP-IPG (image and printing group). I have nothing constructive to say to you. Your driver sucks. Your TCE sucks. You should be condemned to a hell of using your own software. To you I say good day.
September 10th, 2004 at 1:33 pm
This happened just last night:
I had an HP100i DVD burner and with it, I installed the “DVD Bit Compatability software”, a seemingly harmless program that would make my DVDs more compatible with some DVD players.
The DVD burner worked okay, but I got a new one, so I shutdown and removed the HP one and installed a Pioneer DVD burner. Upon restart, I get a pop-up “No HP DVD Drives Detected”. Clicking on “OK” caused the system to REBOOT (all the way as if I had hit “RESET”). Undeterred, I rebooted and this time, tried to kill the dvdbit process. Killing the process also caused a REBOOT. On my 3rd boot, I used msconfig to remove that utility from startup and rebooted again. On my 4th reboot, I purged the program, I think (since the DVD Compatibility Utility did not come with an uninstall).
I think that its gone, as I have also manually purged it from the registry.
Hey HP, I want 3 hours of my life back.