Darice de Cuba

Yesterday I finally bought a printer/scanner combi. My last printer was from 2000 which I stopped using and got rid of 4 years ago. The ever growing amount of bills and insurance paper pushed me to get a printer/scanner combi.

I only need it for occasional printing and scanning of documents and it needed to have network capabilities, so I can put it anywhere I want. Needing network capability and needing it to be cheap I was left with one choice at the store: “HP Photosmart C4580 All-in-One Printer”.

Today I unboxed it thinking the setup would take 30 minutes max. I even read the instructions first to make sure I know what to do. But boy was I wrong, I spend almost two hours fighting to get it to work via network. It started with the delivered CD being defect, I would insert it in my Mac mini and it wouldn’t load, when I finally got it to load and started the driver setup it would keep showing me the annoying beach ball, freezing my system so badly that I have to force shut down.

It was such a headache to get this thing working decently that I’m giving a quick run won of the way I got it working.

How I got it working

After deciding the CD is a lost case I went and downloaded the driver for HP website so I wouldn’t need the CD. Also before starting the driver setup, make sure you join the printers network via Airport. Turn wifi on on the printer and then select “hpsetup” from your Airport list under Devices.

Run install of the driver, when done print out the network settings of the printer, you can get it via the printer menu itself. On the print-out you can see the printers IP address. Access the printers admin through your browser, e.g. http://169...*** where the numbers/stars are your printers IP address of course. Go to Network – Advanced and fill out your own wireless network info(Assuming you use a wireless router). This way you can access your printer through the router. When you save the settings expect the browser to keep loading, I never got a confirmation that it saved the settings. I just printed another sheet with the network configurations to see that it actually saved the settings.

Now your printer is supposed to be part of your wifi network and has it’s own IP. Now go to System Preferences – Print&Fax and add the printer by filling out the new IP address of the printer. This should do the trick.

It works fine for printing, I tried scanning, but after one scan it will get stuck. When I try to scan a second document it keeps saying “scanning…” I have to restart the printer to clear it up. So it’s not working nicely.

All in all HP’s setup instructions sucks badly, I never had so much problems getting a new device setup. It would be so much better if they supplied a step by step instruction on how to add the printer in your existing wireless environment instead of assuming that people will log off their wireless network just to join the adhoc printer network to print or scan.

I still will have to do some Google research to find out how to get the scanner working smoothly when scanning several documents in one sitting.