cellio | argh!

It never occurred to me that after upgrading the Mac from Leopard to Snow Leopard, my printer (HP Laserjet 1020) might no longer work. I had to download a special driver to get it to work with Leopard, and I guess I assumed that driver would still work. Sigh. If I'd actually thought about it, I would have done some research before taking the OS upgrade.

My choices seem to be: (1) revert to Leopard (I don't even know if that's possible without doing damage), (2) wait for a fix (prognosis unclear), or (3) buy a new printer. I wasted a lot of time under Leopard trying (4), network the printer using my PC, so I probably won't try that again. (The Mac still needs a driver, whether the printer is local or remote, so that's not likely to help.) I'll continue with Google research tomorrow; so far the only solution I've found involves downloading a 750MB package, compiling code, and doing lots of fussing.

I realize that this is HP's fault, not Apple's. It's frustrating because I've been using HP printers for more than 15 years without issues and when I bought this one I never thought to check for Mac compatibility. (At the time I wasn't planning to buy a Mac.) It's a peripheral; at some level I expect it to just work.

On the other hand, it's worth noting how easy the OS upgrade was otherwise. Insert disc, confirm intent, leave for an hour, and there it was. I was never willing to attempt an OS change under Windows. This is the only major problem I've seen so far. (There's one minor one that I'll probably just have to get used to; they changed a color that I'd rather they not have, but there doesn't appear to be a user setting for it.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I don't suppose you've been using Time Machine or otherwise doing backups? I've heard a number of people caught by shortcomings in SL successfully reverting via Time Machine, and I presume the same is true with CarbonCopyCloner / SuperDuper! as long as you didn't do a new backup after upgrading (I personally would suspend backups until I knew it was safe, or possibly buy a new backup drive and keep the old as an archive).

I'm using Time Machine, but didn't think to suspend it in time.

With TM it shouldn't matter; you can tell it to restore from before the upgrade.

Google says "Use the HP 1022 driver instead". Have you tried that?

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software7/COL10919/lj-31696-2/LJ_1022_Series_OSX.dmg

That is what I used to get it working with Leopard, but it doesn't work with Snow Leopard.

I've found claims that this works, but it's kind of queasy-making. And that part about having to send a firmware update to the printer on every power-up sounds pretty annoying.

I know that this doesn't solve your problem, but I'd heard that Brother has really mastered the "It Just Works" school of peripheral design. If you're low on toner, it seems like laser printers are headed in the "new printers are barely more expensive than a toner refill" direction.

We picked up a Brother color laser printer recently (an HL-4040CDN), and we've had no problems, even with the variety of goofy operating systems floating around here. It even works with Zeroconf/Bonjour/Avahi.

Thanks for the tip. I've noticed that aspect of printer economics too; it's pretty bizarre. I'm not particularly low on toner, but my time is worth something too so I might just have to give up and buy a new printer, much as that triggers my sense of wrongness.

(I bought my previous printer, an HP LaserJet 5L, in about 1993 for rather more than printers cost these days. But it served me for 12 or 13 years (can't remember exactly); what finally prompted its replacement was persistent jamming that I couldn't fix even with taking things apart and thoroughly cleaning. At that point I noticed that new printers cost barely more than toner cartridges and went that route.)

Aside from the printer, that does sound like a very smooth install. I don't know what it is with printers these days, but I had to jump through a bunch of hoops just to get my printer working on one of my computers. It seems unreasonable.

At work people were going to the Apple store over lunch on the day it was released and asked if I wanted a copy. They were aghast that I did not. My reasons were basically (1) my hardware is old and new OSes really don't get faster, and (2) I would not trust an OS until at least the fourth patch is released. As it turns out the first reason was a good one since from what I read Snow Leopard won't run on my G4.

I wasn't going to buy it yet. Dani wanted it, it sounded benign, and the family pack was cheaper than individual purchases, and I guess I bought into the "things just work on the Mac" mindset (even though my printer hadn't before), so I said sure, get the family pack. What I should have done was say "sure, get the family pack" and then set it aside for six months after he upgraded his machine, but I didn't think it through. I never bought a Windows OS in the year it was issued; why did I upgrade this one right away? Stupid stupid stupid.

Apparently new drivers have been released because customers complained about HP orphaning them.
http://www.macworld.com/article/142768/2009/09/hp_snow_leopard.html

Ooh, thank you! That fixed my problem. (It did some unrelated damage, but I got it cleaned up -- for some reason that OS patch rewrote my network settings! Weird.)

My dad was saying something about network settings getting changed too. My Mac is too old for Snow Leopard so I haven't experienced it personally.

I'm glad that helped!

argh!

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Another non-answer

Re: Another non-answer

no subject

no subject

Have you seen this?

Re: Have you seen this?

no subject