Ok, so I have an HP Deskjet D4160 connected to an XP Home box using USB. I installed the current Basic Drivers for it from the official HP site. Everything installed correctly, and the device prints fine, except that it's slightly misaligned.
Ok, no biggie--I can't expect perfect alignment...well, ever. So I fire up Printing Preferences, go to the Features tab and click the Printer Services button. So I get the error message "Unable to perform the operation".
Already guessing at the cause, but not wanting to believe it, I fire up HP support chat and they tell me I have to install the "full featured" bloatware version of their software to access the alignment utility. Ugh.
I mean come on. 30MB Basic Driver versus 250MB "Full Featured" Driver? Seriously. My printer is just a printer. I think even 30MB is too big to be just a basic driver. I don't want a million services and extra processes running in the background all the time. Actually I'd rather not have any at all. XP's spoolsv.exe should be able to do the job all by itself (no pun intended). I print something maybe once a week--if that...and I don't want any of their crappy bundled graphics software either.
So what's the solution here? The way I see it there are a few questions I want to pose to anyone who has read everything I just said:
1. Is there any way to extract the Alignment/Printer Services module from the 250MB package and get it to work with my Basic Driver? I mean, it seems like the button click event tries to call it and gets no answer. Maybe some combination of dll's?
2. Are there third-party printer alignment utilities out there somewhere? I haven't been able to dig up any, but maybe I'm not looking in the right places.
3. Is there a third-party driver for HP's that gives basic printing functionality and printer services?
4. Some other solution? I'm sure every geek out there is unhappy with HP bloatware and has already been down this road. Don't suggest that I trash the printer or change operating systems (it's not my box). Other than that I'm all ears.
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6 comments:
yeah, so the printer has pretty much aligned itself.
Hi there,
I've just ran across this problem, and likely would rather NOT install the bloatware drivers. So I googled here and there, found your blog, but not much else.
So an idea just ocurred: My linux in the dual boot could do it. As I run VMWare, I didn't ever need to reboot into CentOS, just boot vmware, redirect the USB port to the VM, "yum install hplip", "service hplip start", and "hp-align".
Here goes, if someone is having this problem and does not have dual boot, use a Ubuntu LiveCD or a USB stick with a mini distro that supports HPLIP, and your misalignment problems are gone.
And a great BOO to HP. It is going the Creative Labs way of drivers.
Props to eliphas --
I have several live distros. I didn't even think about using one just for alignment. I ask myself though, what exactly does that mean?... "alignment". I'm assuming it means a calibration between the hardware and the software drivers. If that is the case, then aligning the printer in *nix would work in that memory space, but then switching back to Windows? I'm thinking the settings are written in an INI or the registry or something and they would not be modified by this procedure.
I think similar logic applies to virtually booting a Windows instance with VMWare, etc. -- the settings wouldn't carry over to the host OS.
Does anyone know the specifics of what happens during the alignment process? Where does data get written?
Good for people to know.
The default browser MUST be IE - that is what the Printer Services uses.... when I changed my default browser it IE, it works!
I don´t know what Internet browser has to do with printer services, but anonymous is right. After defining IE as my default browser I was able to get also the ink level, which I was looking for, when I came here.
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