Sheila's Guests and Reviews

One long phone-call, much cutting and pasting and editing of firewall permissions, a bit of uninstalling and reinstalling, a few crossed fingers, time for a quick cup of coffee while the machines restart again... and the very kind lady at HP tech support has got it all fixed up and running beautifully. I can print and scan successfully from my nice new Windows 7 machine. My son can print and scan from his slightly less new Vista machine. And the printing comes out formatted right, margins where we want them to be, book-pages ready to be folded in half and stapled. I'm feeling very happy. And the lady at HP deserves several gold stars. Thank you HP.

It's a puzzle working out why buying a new computer means my printer won't work anymore. But the printer's a wireless HP and the computer has Windows 7. Apparently HP drivers don't work properly beyond Windows XP - at least, not if you want to go wireless, and not if you want to use double-sided printing. Suddenly my printer becomes inaccessible whenever I switch it on (because the IP address might change). My scanner won't work (because the software "fails to install"). And my nicely formatted books now have be hand-fed page by page into the printer because the new (not XP) drivers scale the image and add extra margins at inconsistent sides of a landscape page (making the middle shift in opposite directions so you can't fold the page). Aghghghg! Anyway, here's a much more interesting puzzle. Just click on it, and a nice little jigsaw puzzle site will let you waste precious minutes trying to solve it. Drink coffee. Eat chocolate... And if you want ...

I think our new printer doesn't like yellow. Of course, technically, our printer's not new, but it's newer than the old one which requires frequent man(or woman)handling to get the print heads to move. It's big. It's smart. It sends faxes and photocopies vital documents. And it doesn't like yellow. Our writing group's planning a display of self-produced books at the library, so I thought I'd try my hand at producing some. This meant printing them first, of course, in color because I like pictures. But yellow birds and orange sands don't look right when they come out in stripes. "Try cleaning the heads," the trouble-shooting software said. The ink, originally three-quarters full, rapidly sank to one-quarter. "Did that help?" I searched the internet to find out how to print the test page and see. The answer was no. "You can try a second-level cleaning," said the software gleefully. "But be aware it will use a lot of i...