Brand Of Bother

The Age

Thursday October 11, 2007

Charles Wright

Charles Wright gets under the hood of his PCs when they stop talking to his printers.

WE ARE aware that Bleeding Edge's reputation as a PC brand basher may be at stake since we began fitting out the spouse's office. What with our shopping forays on the Grays Online auction site that we wrote about recently, the premises seem to have become a Hewlett-Packard showroom.

Apart from the cheap LaserJet 3005dn network printer and the networked colour LaserJet 2840 printer/scanner/fax we mentioned then, last week we snapped up a couple of Intel-powered HP Compaq dx7300 PCs - one a Core 2 Duo and the other a D915 - in a frenetic round of last-minute bidding.

With auction charges and delivery fees they cost less than $600 each, and with the operating system DVDs included in the price, and the possibility that 12 months' free support might be worth having in a small business environment, we decided we couldn't do better with the white-box alternatives we usually buy.

The bonus was that it would also allow us to do a longer-term comparison of the retail PC option that the average user seems to prefer, with the Bleeding Edge workhorse PC alternative which, judging from our email, thousands of our readers have apparently chosen.

One of our HP purchases came with a Windows XP Pro SP2 DVD, which is what we've standardised on as the most reliable version of Windows. The OEM version, which we would have had to buy with our white-box components, would have cost about $180.

The second PC came with a Windows Vista Business DVD. We're not thrilled with Vista, but we gambled on being able to downgrade that to XP Pro. Since August, Microsoft has been allowing the big manufacturers to offer XP discs to their Vista Business and Vista Ultimate customers, and an HP spokesman has indicated the switch can be made for "little or no charge".

We'll be writing about our experience on that matter next week, but we can tell you that at the time this column was being prepared, none of the Indian gentlemen we talked to on the incredibly polite support line seemed to be aware of it.

We don't recommend buying PCs without an operating system CD/DVD, but a lot of people seem perfectly happy to do so. The first thing we'd do in that case - provided the system came with Windows XP - would be to create a set-up CD using the information at tinyurl.com/2mtrus.

It's likely to prove very handy, if only for quickly removing all the pre-loaded junk on new PCs from manufacturers such as HP and Dell.

Even if you do have a Windows XP installation CD, you might check out tinyurl.com/qpky, which shows you how to use Bart Lagerweij's Preinstalled Environment (aka BartPE) to create a live bootable CD/DVD.

It gives you a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800x600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS file system support, which is a great replacement for a boot disk if you're burning in a system, virus scanning or rescuing files to a network share.

Our new HP environment gave us the opportunity to trial the free HP helpline when we suddenly found we couldn't print to the LaserJet 3005d over the network. We were confronted with an error message that informed us that "the spooler subsystem app has encountered a problem and needs to close".

Not only did it close, it seemed to take all the printer drivers in the Printers and Faxes area of the Control Panel out to lunch. We tried rebooting, then clearing the print queue for each printer, but every time we tried to print, the error message popped up, and all the print drivers disappeared again. Worse, the problem also struck the other PCs networked to the printer.

Google searches revealed that while several users had experienced the problem, none of the solutions in the Microsoft Knowledge Base and on other public forums seemed to help. Their advice to edit the Registry and/or reinstall the drivers - on each PC - didn't appeal to us.

We rang the HP helpline and talked to an extremely helpful gentleman in Bangalore called Mark.

Unfortunately, Mark seemed to have been furnished with a list of possible solutions that took us through entering services.msc in the Start/Run dialogue box, stopping the print spooler then restarting it, then proceeded to removing the printer driver, downloading another copy, and reinstalling it - a path he wasn't prepared to depart from.

While we decided to humour Mark and go through the procedure on one PC, we were not about to replicate it throughout the network, particularly given our discovery that the uninstall option on the HP Programs menu doesn't remove all the printer files, and you have to hunt around your drive to find other things to zap.

Instead, we did something we should have done in the first place. We headed to the HP users forum at tinyurl.com/6cmbm and rummaged around the postings, which is something the HP tech support department should probably be doing too. We struck paydirt in one of the hints at tinyurl.com/2y46hx. It alerted us to the possibility that what we were dealing with was more of a network error than a spooler issue.

We'd already used the printer's console to print out a configuration page, which gave us its network address. We right-clicked on the LaserJet's icon in the Printers and Faxes area (Start/Printers and Faxes) and selected the Ports tab under Properties. While the port did have a check mark, we discovered that the DHCP server had assigned it a different address from the one it had been allocated at installation, and although the option "Always print to this device even if its IP address changes" was ticked, it clearly hadn't worked. We changed the IP address and had a working network printer.

Maybe Bleeding Edge could learn to live with these brands after all.