[robertobini]

I have had big problems installing this Photo?printer/Scanner.
When I first installed it, it would freeze the computer for 4-5 seconds every 5-10 seconds and often crash it irrecoverably, only a cold boot would do. Even on stand-by.
Eventually it corrupted my Windows installation. After re-installing Windows on a freshly formatted disk, and a few tries, I realised that the Photosmart did not recognise the USB 2 ports, installed as an add-on board on the mainboard (every other peripheral does). When I connected it to a USB 1 port on the mainboard matters improved considerably. When I stopped all its entries in MSconfig I finally got it to work in an acceptable manner. The photo output quality, both from scans and files, is outstanding; so is document scanning and OCR. However, it still blocks everything else, including the mouse, when it is scanning and does not allow me to play CDs or DVDs properly even on stand-by.
On the HP website there are "reduced drivers" for this unit, but I found them even more troublesome than the full version.

Short of upgrading my mainboard/CPU to a higher spec (at present AMD 1.2 GHz with 520 MB memory), is there anything else that I can do to make this unit more compatible with my system?

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All i can find is a USB driver update from Microsoft here: http://support.micro...om/?kbid=822603

Edited by pip22, 16 September 2006 - 01:22 PM.

[pip22]

All i can find is a USB driver update from Microsoft here: http://support.micro...om/?kbid=822603

Edited by pip22, 16 September 2006 - 01:22 PM.

[Neil Jones]

The USB update above is included in Service Pack 2.

Some peripherials just don't want to know when you connect them to a separate PCI USB card, so the only solution to this is to use the onboard USBs.

A common problem with USB 1.1 ports is that they're basically rubbish compared to USB 2.0, which has a lot more "space" available. USB 1.1 transfers stuff at up to 12Mb a second. USB 2 transfers stuff up to 480Mb a second, therefore you can see there's a lot more space to go round on USB 2, including when the printer's receiving data.

It might be worth setting up the printer as the only device to use the onboard (USB 1.1) USB ports and everything else into your USB 2 card. This should allow Windows enough room to listen to the mouse and other USB devices while the printer is busy with the onboard USB ports.

Failing that, the only other solution is a motherboard upgrade to one with USB 2 ports onboard as standard, as this should then automatically solve the issue on its own.

[robertobini]

Many thanks for the replies. The suggestion of swapping the mouse to the USB hub is a good one.