Things to watch out for with HP All-inOne printers

I lost half of the day today, dealing with my HP C6150 all-in-one printer. I purchased a computer running Vista (and this is yet another thing that worked great on XP, but doesn't work well on Vista).

Networked Printer Uninstalling itself on Vista

Every once in a while, the printer just disappeared on the machine. You can see this both by going to the HP Solutions Center software (where it throws a dialog saying "No HP devices detected" and closes), or by going to the list of printers in control panel, and finding it missing. I searched all over, not finding any information to help me on this, so I ended up giving up and contacting HP technical support. I literally described the problem as my having to re-install the printer periodically.

Before I describe the wild-goose chase I was sent down (which by following them, caused my scanner not to work), let me send you the link to the critical update that fixes it. If you're running the C6150 All-in-One and accessing it through the network from a vista machine, download and run the patch linked to this page.

Here is what I was told to do:

• Perform a level-3 uninstall (which didn't follow the standard windows uninstall from control panel)
• Re-install the HP Software, but connecting using the USB port
• Finally, connect to the network and add a device using their software to do the network configuration

This required a at least one re-boot at each step.

Although I was finally able to print, I couldn't scan from the device (and the HP Software said that there was no network printer).

Second Issue that prevented scanning

So, the step of instlling the printer first as USB and then as network was the root of my next set of issues. I'm not sure why they had me do it (must be some other bug). However, the fact that there was both a USB and an ethernet print connection for the same printer and that the first connection was USB was causing the scanning software to not even try using the ethernet one. After much wrangling, I ended up going to the printers in Control Panel. THere I discovered the two entries: "HP Photosmart 6100 series" and "HP Photosmart 6100 series (copy 1)". By deleting the "HP Photosmart 6100 series" printer, and renaming the "HP Photosmart series (copy 1)" to "HP Photosmart series", I was able to scan from my machine.

All I can say is I sincerely hope this posting helps somebody doing a google search on this issue.