After many years of faithful service, my HP LaserJet 2200dn has started printing black lines and ghosting all over the page. Because most of my printing is for work, I asked the company to finance the repairs (or to provide a replacement) and, because they are so serious about green IT (erhum…), rather than use their engineering resource to work out what was wrong and buy the appropriate consumables, they have given me a new printer (an HP Officejet 6310 All-in-One, which seems to be a nice device but it is an inkjet – so expensive to run – and an unnecessary waste of resources as the old printer could have been fixed).

Predictably, I’m having problems installing the software on 64-bit Windows Server 2008 but I’m sure I’ll get there if I do some research (which I won’t at 10pm on a Sunday), but the XP installation on another PC was straightforward (if bloated and time consuming) and the Mac installation seems to have gone reasonably well too (using Bonjour to track down the device on the network). The only catch on the Mac seems to be that the software is written for Mac OS X up to 10.4 and I’m running 10.5.3. This means that some of the hooks in the installer didn’t work – like when it was looking for the printer setup utility and it seems that utility does not exist in Leopard. Luckily, the Leopard’s lost features blog pointed me in the right direction:

“Tiger’s ‘Printer Setup Utility’ has been removed, and all printer configuration is now done and managed exclusively through the Print & Fax system preference pane.”