Re: Seeing VERSIONINFO under Vista?

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I once bought an HP CD-writer, back when they cost about $700 each. It never worked.
According to one story, one major bank in NY bought many hundreds of these, backed up
their data onto CDROM, and discovered some months later that only the CD-writer that wrote
the CD could read it; no other CDROM drive, including standard drives, could read them.
The chairman of this bank demanded that every single HP CD-writer be removed. He had them
placed on a pallet, wrapped in plastic, and sent them to the then-chairman
(pre-Carly-Fiona) of HP, with a note saying that HP had been decertified as a vendor for
any product for any reason by his bank, and that they could re-apply in seven years for
approval status. The problem was apparently a software bug.

Friends who have HP products usually shrug and say "The hardware is great, but the
software uniformly sucks" and rarely replace their HP equipment with other HP equipment.
joe

On Mon, 21 May 2007 12:32:38 +0100, "David Webber" <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


"Joseph M. Newcomer" <newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:tt6v43hptbmd50e3j7gjubqmidfq84fhk5@xxxxxxxxxx

I had no problems with XP until I installed an HP driver; then I had a BSOD
every couple
hours, always from the HP driver. This is why I will never again install
a piece of HP
hardware on my machines. This is not the first set of disasters I had
with HP drivers,
but it will be the last.

That's interesting. I had problems with HP printer drivers. My software
was blitting the (monochrome) music symbols with BitBlt - many hundreds to a
page. (I created them using the Truetype Font engine and lots of glyph
outline stuff: don't ask: it seemed like a good idea at the time).

On HP printers it would give a dirty coloured smudge around many of them.
Then for a given printer they would bring out an updated driver and it would
be fixed. Then they'd bring out a new printer, and the new printer's
drivers would have exactly the same bug - for a year or two until they fixed
it.

In the end I reckoned if it had done this to Microsoft Word, then HP would
be out of business, so I started drawing my music symbols with TextOut (and
a "string" of one symbol in each case). It was quite a bit of work too
restructure it to do this (and get the exact 2d positioning correct on the
page), but it by-passed HP's bug.

I too have never bought another HP printer.

Dave
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.

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