From this awful laptop that is a hopeless pile of crap, to the core strength that was once HP, their printers, it is apparent how the mighty have fallen.
I have posted before on the travails of my lousy laptop. Suffice it to say that it works, but the power management bits are pretty messed up (not sure if it is windows, or the hardware, and frankly at this point, I don’t care.)
This post is on the HP multifunction printer we have. In theory, they are great machines. Color, black and white, scan to email, fax, they just work. But there are some glitches that will drive you bonkers.
By default, they print in duplex. Not too much of a problem, but sometimes you really want to print one-sided. So you end up fixing the settings and printing a second time.
Where they fail miserably is in the collation. For some reason that I haven’t been able to determine, if you print 8 or more pages, the first two are properly sent to the bottom tray, in the proper orientation. Then all the rest will be sent to the top tray, in backwards order.
Is it the shitty HP universal print driver? Is it the shitty onboard software/firmware? Or is it gremlins? Our support organization seems to have given up the search for a solution (as I am sure the only real solution will be to push these units off a ship’s deck into the ocean and replacing them with a better device, canon, brother etc)
So, I am manually collating a 36 page document that has no page numbers, and is backwards in its order.
I feel your pain and frustration. Twenty years ago there was much talk of the paperless office. It still hasn’t happened, though printer problems such as you’re experiencing are likely to deliver it before too long – but not for the reasons originally proposed. It’s just that with all these malfunctioning printers, we’re wasting a shed load of paper. Every time we have to reprint something with different settings, double-sided with the flip on the long-side instead of the short-side, grayscale instead of colour etc, we just waste more of the stuff. Soon there simply won’t be any paper left, and we’ll finally be living in the paperless office 🙂