Do NOT buy HP products

[VK3DRB]

I believe from the day HP sold their quality products to Agilent when an incompetent woman named Carly Fiorina took over, the company became lost all integrity and respect. Every HP product I have bought and used since has been problematic. Bad drivers, bad software, bad hardware quality, bad hardware design and bad support.

I first felt their wrath of HP incompetency when I bought a HP IPAQ phone. It never worked properly from day one (get an incoming phone call and it randomly reboots during the call). Sent it many times under warranty and the f-wits were clueless how to fix it. I ended up debugging it myself and found a major design flaw for which I created a workaround. HP's bundled TomTom software could not run properly on such HP's incompatible hardware design.

The last straw for HP's came tonight. I wasted four hours of my life trying to install a HP P2055dn printer on someone's Windows 10 PC via USB. HP's drivers are dreadful. Their driver website says there are 3 drivers, but only 2 are listed.... can't they even get that right? Their driver software hangs. I finally got the printer driver to be detected, but for the life of me, it does not print a test page. Their moronic HP Doctor software does not work in saying everything is OK when it isn't. There is nothing wrong with the printer hardware other than the logo "HP". I could not be bothered spending a moment longer on this piece of HP crap. In the rubbish it goes - after I put a hammer though it.

Brother is far FAR better in their quality of design and software. Installation is breeze, unlike HP. As for laptops, HP laptops are crap as well. I only use Brother printers and have never been disappointed.

Sadly, this HP was once a good company. From the day Carly Fiorina took over, it has been downhill. If Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard were alive, they would be ashamed of what became of the once great company they founded. One thing that was good out of tonight's experience was an unfriendly reminder... NEVER, NEVER buy HP.

[PartialDischarge]

If you think about it, Keysight should remain HP, and the crap division of computers, IT and other stuff should have been renamed.

[penfold]

Did you update the firmware on the 2055DN? I used to have all those problems with mine until I updated the firmware, since then, it hasn't given any bother and been a good printer ever since.

I'd tend to agree, but the business-grade stuff seems to be a bit polarising of opinions, I had a Z series workstation, which was great, but one day it went wrong. But also worked in an office operating on a fleet of them, where not a single one gave issues. Printers have been good in terms of build quality and lifespan, but not without driver issues and firmware incompatibilities in the meantime.

[khs]

I believe from the day HP sold their quality products to Agilent when an incompetent woman named Carly Fiorina took over..

No. It was not Carly Fiorina.

It was Lew Platt separatet Agilent from HP.

(Charles H. House, THE HP PHENOMENON, around page 416)

[madires]

Since they started to surprise owners of HP printers with firmware updates preventing the use of non-HP ink or toner cartridges I certainly stay away from HP printers.

[NiHaoMike]

When I was in college, I fixed a HP PC for my friend Allie Moore, which was when I got to see just how poorly made the HPs were compared to Dells of about the same age. Then a few years later, I worked at a place that used HP PCs (not cheap ones either, I recall the list price was something like $3000) and the one I was using broke down. When I went to the IT office to get it fixed, there was a pile of broken HPs waiting for warranty repair. I have never seen so many broken PCs in one place before that...

[james_s]

The HP PCs I've dealt with recently really are not great, I do remember a friend had a HP Vectra 486 that was fantastic but that was about 25 years ago. I haven't really had a lot of issues with HP printers though, I have a Laserjet M254dw that has been brilliant. It's on my network, works with Windows, Mac, Linux no problem, prints fantastic quality (by laser printer standards) color photos, razor sharp text, I've printed a few thousand pages since I bought it, without so much as a hiccup. Wasn't even very expensive.

[james_s]

Since they started to surprise owners of HP printers with firmware updates preventing the use of non-HP ink or toner cartridges I certainly stay away from HP printers.

That's annoying. I guess it's a good thing that I've never updated the firmware on my printer. I don't like updates in general, far too often I have been burned by updates that broke things that were working fine, or added annoying "features" I didn't want. I'm old fashioned in that I expect to buy a device and have it in a finished working state out of the box and just keep working until end of life. The ability to update firmware easily has led to an attitude of "just ship it now and fix/finish it later" which I don't like at all.

[rsjsouza]

I was burned in a very distant past with HP laptops, but at the time they were using the defective Nvidia chips (forgot their series, circa 2006) and they did RMA without a problem. Over the years I had four printers from them (coming from a heavy Epson lineage), all multi-functional and only one (Officejet 6500) was of appalling quality (broke very prematurely) and very expensive to run. The printer that replaced the 6500 was the Officejet 8600, which was extremely conservative in ink usage and an overall great machine. Last week, however, its scanner gave up in the middle of a large job and I rushed to replace it with a 9025e. It works well, is fast and had dual sided scanner with ADF, which is what we need, but so far I have no other info. Ah, the install on a computer was a bit of a PITA, but the printer service on the cellphone recognized it immediately.

[gnavigator1007]

Few years ago, I ended up calling their support line trying to track down a driver (on laptop) that was listed on their site, but was missing a download option. Call center person tried to transfer me to a "tech" for some outrageous $$$/minute rate just to diagnose my issue. I've never hung up a phone faster in my life. Not too long later ended up with another hp laptop. Keyboard never worked out of the box. The owner had had so much runaround with support that they just packed it away and forgot it for months. Easy fix, but crazy that hp would further damage their relationship with a customer that already received a defective item. Haven't had much experience dealing with their printers aside from harvesting the guts out of them, but that itself would seem to indicate that the folks leaving them on the curb don't exactly hold them in high regard.   

[Karel]

I would never buy an inkjet printer. But 10 years ago I bought an HP Laserjet P2055 and I have no complains about it.
It's recognized out of the box on Linux. As of today it still works fine.
But I'll never buy one of the HP consumer class products.

[VK3DRB]

Did you update the firmware on the 2055DN? I used to have all those problems with mine until I updated the firmware, since then, it hasn't given any bother and been a good printer ever since.

I'd tend to agree, but the business-grade stuff seems to be a bit polarising of opinions, I had a Z series workstation, which was great, but one day it went wrong. But also worked in an office operating on a fleet of them, where not a single one gave issues. Printers have been good in terms of build quality and lifespan, but not without driver issues and firmware incompatibilities in the meantime.

I took one last stab at it. Upgraded the firmware tot eh lasts release is 2015, but the driver still hangs. Possibly a registry issue. In fact the clowns at HP describes registry fixes on their website. Could not be bothered. In the bin it went. I have used Brother printers for the past 10 years. NEVER had a problem. They perform well. 10/10 for Japanese quality in design and manufacture, in contrast to HP of the USA. My main Brother printer is a MFC-L2730DW wireless network... brilliant little goer. I print instruction manuals for products I make on the side and it just keeps pumping out the reams without a hiccup. Would I buy Brother again? You betcha.

Maybe HP should start making toilet paper because they seem to be a business closely aligned to crap.

[VK3DRB]

I believe from the day HP sold their quality products to Agilent when an incompetent woman named Carly Fiorina took over..

No. It was not Carly Fiorina.

It was Lew Platt separatet Agilent from HP.

(Charles H. House, THE HP PHENOMENON, around page 416)

Carly Fiorina masterminded the merger with Compaq, which was the beginning of the end for HP. Fiorina laid off 30,000 HP employees as a result of the merger with Compaq - it was HER doing. She wasn't there for long before she was booted out by the board - with an outrageous severance pay of $US 42 million. A couple of years earlier, Louis Gerstner at IBM pocketed around $500 million, whilst treating employees as disposable fodder. Greed is not good for anyone except for the pig with his or her snout in the trough.

[madires]

That's annoying. I guess it's a good thing that I've never updated the firmware on my printer. I don't like updates in general, far too often I have been burned by updates that broke things that were working fine, or added annoying "features" I didn't want.

You don't have to worry about old printers, they won't get firmware updates anyway. The effected printers are newer models from the last 4 years or so and they have auto-update enabled by default. The first time HP tried to activate the HP-only feature there was a huge outcry and HP backed down. But they are still trying push that feature.

[Siwastaja]

I thought I had seen everything but when an HP "office" inkjet printer suddenly woke up and printed a colorful advertisement of HP without my consent obviously using the expensive inks in the process, I was actually stunned.

[Howardlong]

There's always the botched purchase of Autonomy, and HP Enterprise.

Around 2010 before the Autonomy takeover, I had some dealings with Autonomy and it was very disappointing from a developer perspective. Unfortunately at that time C-level execs were swooning over Autonomy's over-promised and under-delivered unstructured data management features.

HP Enterprise is the race to the bottom IT services outsourcing outfit, the standard fare of vendor lock-in over a period of several years & mediocre inflexible offering because the C-levels only look at short term $$$, ignoring the need for agility & the need to be able to adapt to changing business requirements.

[edy]

My experience is as a consumer mainly with consumer-level HP printers and computers/laptops. My two cents... The consumer printer market seems to be a spiral down to the bottom with ever-cheaper up-front devices being sold to try to lock you in to ink-subscriptions. Brother seems easier to hack in this respect so I buy whatever printer is cheap that I can then be able to defeat this marketing system. My HP multifunction stopped printing years ago (will never by inkjet again) but I still use the scanning autofeeder (jams a lot especially on flipping pages to do double-sided) and fax, with Linux drivers. If I could just chop it in half and keep the scanner part I would, but I couldn't be bothered and as I'm cleaning up will probably toss the entire thing in garbage... Instead I use my newer Brother scanner/ laser (although it doesn't have the feeder which is nice).

Laptop-wise, my wife's old HP still working. Battery long dead so plug in only... Ubuntu installed on it and works fine. Not a terrible machine, but I wouldn't spend much on a new one... It was relatively cheap at the time. To me HP defines low-end consumer market. Maybe they were better before, but ever since I can remember HP has not instilled confidence so I settle for them if they are inexpensive, and expect the same performance as any other cheap consumer-level electronics (which is not much). Again, I'm looking at this as a consumer printer/laptop user and have not know HP long enough to know "when they used to be good".

[Robert Smith Eco Warrior]

.........Every HP product I have bought and used since has been problematic. Bad drivers, bad software, bad hardware quality, bad hardware design and bad support.

... NEVER, NEVER buy HP.

That has been my experience too 

[Stray Electron]

When I was in college, I fixed a HP PC for my friend Allie Moore, which was when I got to see just how poorly made the HPs were compared to Dells of about the same age. Then a few years later, I worked at a place that used HP PCs (not cheap ones either, I recall the list price was something like $3000) and the one I was using broke down. When I went to the IT office to get it fixed, there was a pile of broken HPs waiting for warranty repair. I have never seen so many broken PCs in one place before that...

  HP Computers are not the same as HP's instruments so don't confer that just because HP makes sorry computers and sorry printers that HP TE is just as bad.

   I have a somewhat recent (8? year old?) HP laptop that I don't have any complaints about (AFTER I clean of the JUNK software that they pre-loaded on it!) BUT HP  have always been a day late and a dollar short when it comes to their PC type computers. HP introduced CPM computers after everyone else had already switched to MS-DOS. And then HP introduced the HP-150 that ran HP-only DOS after everyone else had switched to 100% IBM PC compatible computers. Then HP's Carly Fiorina bought out Compaq computers when the IBM computer clone companies were clearly fighting to survive and Compaq was rapidly failing. Then HP, for years, couldn't build a computer that didn't fail within a few months. IMO HP has consistently  failed to deliver a good PC type computer and/or before that part of the market had already disappeared.

   I love most HP products but their PC computers have always been an extreme disappointment.

 

[james_s]

I love most HP products but their PC computers have always been an extreme disappointment.

As I mentioned earlier, look at the Vectra series from the late 90s, yes they're technologically irrelevant today but they were very good systems that performed well for their time and were reliable. There is a wide span between CP/M machines and the junk consumer PCs that currently get the HP badge slapped on them.

[rstofer]

I don't know about USB connectivity but on my LAN I have that very same P2055dn, an M401DW Laserjet and a MFP277 Color Laserjet.  All work perfectly.  If any firmware updates were required, they must have been hidden because I haven't done anything.

I can hit these printers from Win7, Win10, several incantations of Ubuntu Linux as well as from Raspberry PIs and an NVIDIA Jetson Nano.  I can also hit the P2055dn from an LPC1768 uC using Berkeley Sockets to send plot commands.

I may get upset with HP from time to time but not over their printers.

[AtomicRob]

Wait, I thought HP was an ink company that gave you a free printer clipped to your ink cartridge?

[Bud]

I thought I had seen everything but when an HP "office" inkjet printer suddenly woke up and printed a colorful advertisement of HP without my consent obviously using the expensive inks in the process, I was actually stunned.

This is batshit crazy 

[TimFox]

I love most HP products but their PC computers have always been an extreme disappointment.

As I mentioned earlier, look at the Vectra series from the late 90s, yes they're technologically irrelevant today but they were very good systems that performed well for their time and were reliable. There is a wide span between CP/M machines and the junk consumer PCs that currently get the HP badge slapped on them.

What I remember about the early Vectra DOS computers is that they were built mechanically to typical -hp- standards, which made them more expensive than the competition, which was uneconomical since the field was advancing quickly and they quickly went obsolete.

[james_s]

What I remember about the early Vectra DOS computers is that they were built mechanically to typical -hp- standards, which made them more expensive than the competition, which was uneconomical since the field was advancing quickly and they quickly went obsolete.

They were expensive, but they were very nice if you could afford them. I knew somebody who had a Vectra 486-33 that was the fastest PC I had ever used at the time. It was noticeably quicker than the few other 486-33 systems I had access to. Nice compact system too, and it seems like it was unusually quiet.