It’s unbelievable ! I have just received my brand new HP C5180 printer with a feature that made me to choose this one, the on-board Ethernet connectivity, and it just does not work ! How is it possible that such a so easy testable feature does not work out-of-the-box.

Let’s see what happened.

I installed the printer and started the initial cartridge alignment and then I plugged the Ethernet cable. So far, there was no issue. Then, I installed the software and the driver that come with the product on one of my two laptops, the latest one, with Windows XP. And then, I was so surprised and scared by the time it took to install of the drivers. It took sooooo much time and it installs sooooo much things. I can not believe it is not possible, in the software industry we are living into, to have drivers that could not be smaller, imagine, 300 MB of software !!! If only it worked.

I really took care to shutdown all the firewalls both on the laptop and on my wireless router. The install ran really fine and it seemed to work perfectly. I rebooted the laptop and it was ok. Then, I made the mistake (yup, I think it was a mistake because I suddenly switched into a nightmare…) to install the same software on my other laptop with Windows 2000. The print feature was perfectly installed but….it was simply impossible to connect the scan functionality. Every time I tried to scan a document or a picture, I got the “Impossible to connect the scan device” or a similar message. Moreover, the Photosmarts softwares just crashed. But, with a different user on the same machine, with no special privileges (so, a non-admin user), the Photosmart softwares are running fine but it is still impossible to detect the scanner.

Okay, I switched to my first laptop, and, gosh ! It was not working anymore ! Impossible to connect to the scanner, nor the printer. What was unbelievable is that on the HP web site, there was really nothing about this issue. At least, I thought it. But after a long time of googling the web about this problem, I finally found this post. The final word is that to be able to detect your scanner on your LAN, you have to touch your windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file to add the IP address and the name of the printer into it. On the post above, they say that HP opened a trouble ticket with the number (a case) with the number 7335453334.

Euh, not a so final word. Ooooh, noo ! On my other laptop, the Win2K one, I still can not use my HP software with my admin account. So, if a reader has a solution, I will really be happy to finally fix this annoying issue. Otherwise, I will continue to google the web….

UPDATE : It seems that a part of the problem was caused by my previous HP scanner software/driver. Indeed, I had a HP Precision Scan installed and after the uninstall, the HP Solution Center worked a _little_ bit better. A little bit better, because now it crashes only when I click the “Scan Picture” button. With a non-admin, it works.