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HEWLETT PACKARD - their logo / slogan is "invent®". 

Software is supposed to be user friendly, intuitive, helpful, intelligent, and oh, did I say USER FRIENDLY? 

I am the ¿proud? owner of not 1, not 2, but 3 HP® DeskJet®  printers. 

The 540 is in a box in the garage. I really hated to put it there - REALLY didn't want to, but the nice folks at Best Buy wanted to charge me a LOT of money to do a cleaning and apply some (they wouldn't tell me what kind) treatment to the rubber rollers so that it would feed paper through it. I REALLY wanted to just keep my 540 in service but alas, even though the printing mechanism worked find if the rollers cannot grab the paper to pull it through the printer is essentially worthless. So I guess it will collect dust in the garage unless and until I can find a means to make the rollers grab the paper again without spending enough money  to purchase a new printer. 

About 1.5 years ago after the (GRRRRRR) Lexmark scanner/printer/copier thinger ate up one too many of the receipts it was supposed to be printing for the customers in my store and found itself SMASHED I bought another HP DeskJet. I about drove myself CRAZY trying to get it to work on the parallel port (that the Lexmark liked just fine) so after several calls to tech support and several trips to the store for more and better cables I finally had to say "FUCK-IT!" and use the USB hookup. I REALLY wanted it to work with the parallel port because I have software that I've written that (due to the programming language) can only access LPT or COM ports - no USB. The problem I experienced with the printer port was that no matter how many times I installed / uninstalled / rebooted etc. ad. nauseum. the printer would print 1 or 2 lines of garbage at the top of the page then shoot that page out and start with another line or 2 of garbage on another page. Alas, I digress... This is supposed to be about HP's software. After using my nice shiny new DeskJet printer for awhile I started getting POP-UP messages telling me "You're almost out of ink...."  well the pages continued to look fine and as I am working in my shop helping customers and having the "out of ink POP-UP" appear every time I try to print a receipt or a credit card transaction for one of my customers I started trying to find a way of telling the HP software "leave me the FUCK alone." only there did not SEEM to be any way to suppress these annoying POP-UPs from HP. The interesting part of this whole mess is that after the FIRST "out of ink POP-UP" my printer successfully printed many customer invoices a day (including random letters, signs, etc.) for at least a MONTH! I was apparently a month away from running out of ink when it started to annoy me with the "out of ink POP-UP" messages.  Well enough was enough. One day I got really pissed and called HP's technical support. It seems that they DID have a solution for this problem - in what they call the "hacker's menu"..

How do you GET to the "hacker's menu"?  Well let me tell you it is NOT easy - no casual nor sophisticated user could possibly find it through any user interface willingly provided by HP. Seems that you have to open the printer control program, click on help, then on about,  then you need to hold down CTRL and SHIFT while clicking (or is it double-clicking?)  on the picture of the printer for this "hacker's menu" to appear. Once you do that its pretty easy to turn off the FUCKING POP-UP messages but who in their right mind is going to think to try all that????

The BIGGER question is why in the FUCK would hp INTENTIONALLY HIDE this option that would more appropriately be located in "preferences" or "user options"?   Is it:
(a) so they can make people change ink cartridges about a MONTH before they would actually run out - thus generating them massive revenue and costing their customers hundreds of dollars on prematurely discarded ink cartridges? 
(b) they desire drive more (presumably fee-based) calls to their technical support department? 
(c) they just want to keep popping up their name in front of the people that ALREADY buy and use their products just to remind them that they do in fact HAVE a product made by HP?
(d) do they just want to PISS OFF their customers? 
I don't know - presumably someone in their public relations department could answer this question - if they do I will certainly place HP's response on my website. 

TODAY (7/21/2003) 
Well now I have a model 3820 occupying the space that the beloved (now garage occupying) 540 used to occupy. And now AGAIN I am plagued with the FUCKING POP-UP messages - but this time its even more STUPID!!!!! Right NOW every time I print a document I get the following FUCKING POP-UP message: 

Now one would interpret this message to mean that if you click on "cancel print" your printing will not come out and if you click on the little square to the left of "ordering information" that some information would be displayed that would assist the user in their attempt to procure new printer cartridges. That leaves the "OK" option which I think most intelligent people would interpret as meaning "I understand - GET OUT OF MY FACE!!!!!" only when you click on the "OK" option (without doing anything else) HP's software - in a MOST STUPID manner will present you with:

I'm thinking.... "Excuse the fuck out of me, but I DIDN'T install any new cartridge - why is HP's stupid (NOT intelligent) software INSISTING that I did?

Well OK then... I guess I can cope... EXCEPT - after poking around in a menu that looks like this:

Then I find the following:

Where it LOOKS like that I have been able to set the "low ink warnings" to OFF but no matter how many times I do that I still get the annoying FUCKING POP-UPS...

It would appear that HP needs someone to tell them that "Software is supposed to be user friendly, intuitive, helpful, intelligent, and oh, did I say USER FRIENDLY?"

UPDATE 11/8/2003: The black ink cartridge FINALLY ran out of ink.... 3-1/2 MONTHS after the fucking "LOW INK" pop-ups started...

I didn't buy another, just re-filled it and it works GREAT - EXCEPT I still have no help from HP and still have to contend with closing out TWO fucking pop-up windows every time I print another document.