Printers

From ITCH

Installation saved with XP SP2

A client brought a new HP all-in-one and the software would not install on a 3 yr old Mesh PC with XP. At the point you plug in the USB to the printer and wait for the driver install the XP 'add new hardware' dialogs came up (they should have been hidden). One of the myriad of devices kept failing with the error 'the system failed to find the file specifed' but no file was specified. Plus it wanted usbscan.sys and I kept having to insert the Windows disk and. Doubt was increased by the fact that Mesh had not supplied a full XP disk but one of those useless recovery CDs that many manufacturers used to fob you off with (should be outlawed).

The HP support site suggest a few things, mainly un-installing the HP software and trying to repair msiexec (the windoews installer), none of which worked but took ages to try.

In the end I installed SP2 in the hope that it would update the usb system files and remove the need to swap disks. It worked, phew. One sticky moment was when it seem to hang during driver installation. It turned out to be a dialog box nicely hidden behind the main window, grrr.

I was slightly concerned that SP2 might cause problems but it worked fine. Happy customer.