Being a cautious soul, when I bought my new iMac, I double checked with the Apple store in Paris to ensure that all my software and hardware would continue to operate with my new computer. Looked up all the right words in French an’ everything, I did. Gave them the make and model of my printer – HP Laserjet Pro P1102w – ‘Oui’, they said it was compatible. I can’t blame Apple for this because that is what it says right there on the HP paperwork.
I have a laserjet printer because I very, very rarely ever print anything. Living in a country where temperatures regularly hit 40°, whenever I did go to print something, like once every six months, I would invariably find that at least one of the coloured inks had dried up and the printer would refuse to work. 30 Euros and a 20 km drive was necessary before running off a quick copy…irritating beyond belief.
Needless to say, the printer resolutely refuses to work with the new computer. It’s exactly 12 months and three weeks old, naturally. Bought from Comet. Naturally.
‘Driver needs updating’ it says. No problem, I’m not a complete dork; living in the middle of rural France I have had to get used to solving my own problems – no PC world to dump the computer in. Off to HPs website to download the ‘latest driver for HP Laserjet Pro P1102w compatible with Mountain Lion’. A simple enough task, just made dinner a tad late.
The printer continued to sulk. No way was it going to give me the precious copy of the Sunday Times crossword that a kind reader had sent me to enjoy after dinner.
Dinner bolted, and back to the computer. Google is my friend. ‘HP Laserjet Pro P1102w and OS X 10.8.2′. I made friends rapidly, I was not alone in my troubles. The Internet is full of people trying to figure out how to marry these two cyber-souls. A civil partnership would have done, I’m not picky. ‘You can’t connect via a USB hub’ was the answer. ‘There isn’t such a driver’ was the other answer.
On the phone to the Apple store first thing in the morning. Three renditions of Greensleeves, four different multiple choices of extensions to traverse, all in French of course, and within, ooh, about 20 minutes, we have the French speaking technical assistant in Sierre Leon on the phone. ‘You said it was compatible, tell me how to do it’ – ‘HP says it is compatible, you have to ask them, we don’t do technical support for HP products unless you buy them through the Apple store’.
Back to the HP website. Dig deeper. Indeed you can’t connect via the USB hub. Remove USB cable. What next?
‘Upgrade your old computer to 10.6 before migrating to new computer, then your printer will continue to work with an automatically updated driver’. An essential piece of information that would have been so useful at point of sale, but indeed none of the information HP provided to Apple contained this gem. I checked!
‘If attempting a new installation of the HP Laserjet Pro P1102w to Mountain Lion 10.8.2, use Airport or connect via ethernet cable’.
Quick Google to establish what Airport is – I don’t have it, and it requires an extra £100 to the Apple store to acquire it – let’s try the ethernet cable solution…Mr G is sent rummaging in the bowels of the carefully painted panelling to find the other end of the long time redundant ethernet cable.
The HP Laserjet Pro P1102w only has one hub – that takes a USB connection. Nowhere to plug in the ethernet cable. Rats. This is ridiculous. Mid morning now, and the days blog post still not written. I’ll just have to phone HP.
‘If your HP Laserjet Pro P1102w is out of warranty, we offer technical support for a one off payment of $25 via a US phone number’.
Phew! At least I get free phone calls to the US, is it worth a tenner to solve the problem and get on with the rest of the day? Yes.
Brr-brr, brr-brr, Greensleeves (does everybody use Greensleeves?) and a multiple choice voicemail – at least it’s in English. Yes, I want technical support, HP Laserjet Pro P1102w, sales, understand that this may incur a charge, bla, bla, bla, and success, we are through to a human being. In India…
‘What is your name please’, ‘Anna’,
‘And your e-mail address’, ‘Anna, that’s a, double nn, no double nn, for nobody, yes, another a, ok, lets start again, a, double nn’. Three times.
‘Thank you Anna, and how can I help you’.
‘I need to buy technical support for a HP Laserjet Pro P1102w’ (what was the point of all the voicemail choices, you should know this!)
‘I’ll put you through to technical support for HP Laserjet Pro P1102w’
‘Thank you’ – and more Greensleeves.
‘Can I take your name please?’, ‘and your e-mail address?’ ’Anna, that’s a, double nn, no double nn,”Thank you Anna, and how can I help you?’
And more Greensleeves.
‘Where are you phoning from, US or Canada? ‘France’. ‘Is that in US or Canada?’. ‘Neither, it’s in Europe’. ‘Europe in US or Canada?’.
Grrr!
Having nothing better to do, I was keeping count of the number of times I repeated this conversation; five different people, every one I had to painfully spell out my e-mail address before they would continue the conversation; eventually they gave me a number in England to call. An 0845 number. You can’t dial an 0845 number from outside the UK. I explained one more time that France was in neither the US, nor Canada, nor the UK. We settled on an 0844 number eventually.
It was engaged. Constantly.
Back to the forums. A helpful soul, God bless you Sir, gave out an unpublished number for HP. Success!
‘Can I take your name please?’ ‘Anna’, ‘and your e-mail address?’ ‘And how can I help you’.
I kid you not, eventually I greeted the ‘technical bod’ with ‘Greetings No 15′ – I was still keeping count!
‘No 17, (I was running out of space on my notepad) listened carefully (after taking my e-mail address naturally) and agreed that there was a problem, but she would send me a link in about five minutes that would solve the problem. I had been on the phone continuously for one hour and 36 minutes…
20 minutes later, she graciously sent me the link to, wait for it…the download for Mountain Lion 10.7 that I had found for myself a mere 12 hours beforehand…had I been paying for the phone call it would have cost me around £5 and that is assuming I was on a BT land line.
| File name: |  |
LJP1100_P1560_P1600_Full_Solution.dmg [1/1, 93.34M]
|
| System requirements: | |
No additional prerequisites |
| Released: | |
2012-10-17 |
| Version: | |
8.0 |
| Compatibility: | |
Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS X 10.5, Mac OS X 10.6, Mac OS X, Mac OS X 10.7 |
The sharp eyed will have noticed that there is no mention of 10.8 there, something which escaped the dozy eyes of HPs technical bods…
I’ve spoken to 17 different technical gurus, and a few extra at Apple. Every one of them paid the minimum rate for whichever country they were in, everyone of them believing they are doing a decent days work, and every one of them utterly useless.
Here’s a free solution from an old age pensioner in France with no technical training whatsoever – connect your old lap top to your printer, and pick up the e-mail with the Sunday Times crossword on your lap top, then press ‘print’. Works every time. Repeat as necessary every six months when you need a printer.
Forget buying a new printer from HP – around 400 euros; forget buying Airport from Apple – around 100 euros; and definitely forget spending a penny on technical support from HP, they are all blithering idiots.
Would somebody let me know if HP ever release a driver for Mountain Lion 10.8.2 and the HP Laserjet Pro P1102w?
Thank you. This has been a public service announcement.
Ms Raccoon lives in the Monbazillac area of South West France, renowned for its fine wines and gourmet food, so she frequently finds better things to do than sit in front of a computer all morning. She is liable to take off traveling at a moment's notice. Consequently this blog only gets updated these days when it is raining - and it doesn't rain very often round here...
{ 36 comments }
Mornin’ Anna,
Personally, I’d forget buying anything from Apple ever again…
…A bunch of control freaks with a genius at the helm might be satisfactory sometimes…
But when the whole shebang is being run by a dork… the dorkiness filters down through the ranks quite quickly.
Apple stopped being any good at “Snow Leopard”, I am seriously thinking about overcoming all the barriers to using free software, like configuration etc.
Ubuntu is pretty much British and it’s free.
Morning Right,
I’m very, very happy with the computer (though getting caffeine withdrawal now, since it doesn’t leave me time to grind the beans, boil the water and make the coffee in between changing pages…) but seriously it is a fantastic machine, no complaints, it just won’t talk to the printer.
I’ve been a Mac user since the late 1980′s. I currently have a beast of an 8-core MacPro, 12GB RAM and 4 x 1TB hard drives, and two DVD burners (one is LightScribe) with two monitors. I’m a graphic designer so such a set-up is ideal. I am running 10.8 Mountain Lion; I find it excellent and I haven’t yet run into any “barriers”. For the very occasional time when I need to run obscure Windows programs, I use VMWare fusion to run two virtual machines – one with Windows 7 Ultimate and one with XP Pro – ant these VM’s run a damn sight faster than the PC on my desk at work.
Both of my sisters had Windows PCs, and also had loads of trouble – OS upgrades broke software, printer & peripheral drivers etc.
After (finally) seeking my counsel, they have both now been iMac users for the last 18 months, and both regret not having made the switch earlier.
À chacun son goût…
Also, Apple released (on 10 January) “HP Printer Drivers v.2.13 for OS X”. See: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL907
There is a list of compatible models at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3669#HP and the P1102w is definitely listed.
This might well be going over ground you’ve alrady covered, but certainly try (if you haven’t already) Apple’s Software Update – click on the grey apple (top left of the screen) and it’s the second option down.
Keep us posted
The message I got was don’t buy HP…
You can call an 0845 number from outside the UK. Just use the country code and leave the zero out. EG, 0044 845
Even more fun than my getting a Galaxy Note to work!
Many years ago, when the world was a simpler place, a very frustrated prehistoric man spent many hours of valuable drinking time trying to get information on how to achieve a successful marriage of his brand new, super-duper bronze axe-head (a nice, shiny replacement for his clunky old stone axe-head) with the comfortable wooden axe-helve that had served him well for many years in the old stone axe-head. He may well have ended up committing vile atrocities against the bronze axe-head supplier, thus creating antipathy between neighbouring tribes that endures to this day.
Since then, things have just become steadily more complicated.
I gave up on Apple years ago because of their controlling and proprietry attitude. PCs can be cantankerous and difficult, not as smooth and simple to use but essentially that’s because they are inherently more versatile and allow you to ‘walk on the grass’. Someone somewhere on the interweb has solved every possible problem.
I had essentially the same problem when my Mother decided to upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 – the OS recognises the make and model of the printer, but won’t do anything with it.
There was a theory that a particular Minolta driver would work because the two printers shared some common internals, but I couldn’t make that work either. I was a little suspicious that the Minolta was listed as colour, where the HP was monochrome.
Anybody want an old HP laser printer? One careful lady owner….
Careful? I doubt if its printed so much as a dozen pages in its entire life!
HP is notorious for its after sales care! As for a colour laser printer, too many peripherals have to replaced over time. I’d always recommend a simple (and cheap) Epson all-in-one inkjet, assuming they’re compatible with Mac (tried an Apple laptop and ended up giving it away to a friend in Thailand, getting a laptop with the Windows OS – XP & 7 being the best of the bunch, recommending Apple/Mac for those who work with graphics only.) Epson toner prices are reasonable and you can get good generic toners that are very cheap and the Epsons have never given me any problems.
OK, laser-printed pages don’t smudge if you drop liquid on them whereas inkjet pages do – only advantage I can see though.
No expert, but Mac-printer communications are simultaneously much easier and much harder than under Windows. I bought a Macbook to replace my ancient Windows laptop and I really did not expect my old printer to work with the new machine. I downloaded drivers and updates and lord-knows-what for the printer in anticipation of it being a ball-ache. At first go the computer didn’t like the printer. I installed the downloaded driver and it still didn’t work, but then after a couple more attempts it just started working and hasn’t given me a fault since.
I realise this isn’t very helpful…
But a damned sight more helpful than HP have been!
Hi Anna.
My HP works fine with Mountain Lion on a MacBookPro. Don’t plug the printer into the USB port before you boot up. If you do then it can’t see it!
I have to turn on the Mac, wait for it to boot, then attach the USB printer lead after powering up the printer. It then recognises the printer and all is well.
Sometimes,you have to attach the printer before loading the application you want to print from. This is certainly true in MS Word, but then Microsoft are nearly as useless as HP.
Sometimes unplugging the printer from the USB port, waiting a few seconds and then plugging it back in again clears the problem.
You shouldn’t need an HP driver at all with Mountain Lion, so try uninstalling it and letting Mountain Lion’s inbuilt generic drivers do the work.
Do let me know how you get on!
The pragmatic solution is a sheet of plain paper, a ruler, and a “BIC For Her Medium Ballpoint Pen”.
Firstly, draw on the paper, the image from the screen. Save this for later.
Secondly, read all the reviews for the pen. This’ll take your mind off the frustration of the incompatibility of your printer with your computer.
Might I suggest you buy yourself a spare hard drive and install Linux on it and give that a go?
Now I’m not what one would call computer literate by any means, but with the odd problem with “Broadcom” chipped stuff (wifi) everything I’ve tried (peripheral wise) just plugs and plays.
Software is free, and works very well. OK it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles on it like annoying paperclips that won’t shut the fuck up pestering you etc, but to me that’s a plus point.
I dont do Apple, so this might not be very useful….
HP Laserjet drivers are very standard across models. HP uses a standard protocol (PCL) to drive printers which means it can be easy to get a HP printer to work correctly. Connecting to an old HP printer can be problematic, not because of the “print” driver, but because of the driver to connect PC to printer. However a network attached HP printer is normally super simple to get working.
The model you are using, in theory, has wireless support. So if you update the settings on the printer to connect to your wi-fi you should then be able to either print direct workout needing a driver, or force a HP driver to install because it can see the printer on the network.
BUT…. To configure the printer to use wireless you need to install the driver first (which you cant!). A lovely catch 22.
If you still have your old PC connect it to the printer and configure wireless for your network, or ask a friend to come round with a supported PC (windows? might allow the changes needed) to install the driver and then update the wireless settings in the printer for your network.
A quick google found http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c02847467&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=4110396
As far as i can tell you don’t need an airport wifi router, any wifi router should work fine.
After configuring the printer to use your wifi settings, you might need to enable the “Bonjour” service on the printer. My HP printer has Bonjour enabled by default, and I assume the same is true with your printer.
This http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c972ybZvZzo might help in the wifi config once you can find a PC that will connect to the printer via USB.
I would concur with other comments on here. Don’t buy an HP. I’ve had my fingers bitten twice now and never again.
Sadly, this kind of enforced obsolescence is all too common place when it comes to low cost consumer peripherals and has been an issue for at least the last 10 years – and HP is by no means the worst offender.
It started, originally, with cheap flat-bed scanners but quickly migrated into the bottom-end printer market and its pretty much the same scam every time. It starts a new iteration of, or update to, an operating system ‘breaks’ the existing drivers. Peripheral manufacturers could quite easily produce an updated driver but if your printer/scanner isn’t the latest model and its costs less than £100 then, more often than not, they won’t bother in the hope generating sales from people for whom laying out the cost of replacing their device with a newer model is less hassle than not having a working device and hassling the manufacturer for a driver update.
If a working printer is an essential, and especially if you don’t need colour printing, then it’s best to avoid the consumer models and pay the extra for a mid-range office workhorse laser printer with a built-in ethernet connection. You’ll take hit on the purchase cost but recoup long-term on longevity and you won’t have any problems with driver updates as even the likes of HP know better than to try an screw over their corporate customers.
Somewhere up in the loft I still have an original HP Laserjet 1, still in working order despite being well over 25 years old but sadly unusable as toner cartridges are now as rare as hen’s teeth – had I got a toner cartridge then I bet I could get it connected to your iMac and working perfectly in less than ten minutes.
The model you are using has wireless support (WiFi). If your modem also has WIFI ( do you use a cable to connect to the internet {modem])?
The following link may be usefull for you.
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c03425022&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&os=219&product=4110396&sw_lang=#N87
It should be plug and play if Bonjour is enabled.
regards
““Technical support from HP, they are all blithering idiots”
Been there, done that! I bought an HP laptop, and then found out the cooling fan speed control wouldn’t work properly if the machine was put into standby and then resumed. It turns out it is a known problem, but despite numerous emails and phone calls over several months they never did anything about it.
Next time, buy a Windows PC and use a Laserjet 4 driver.
Job done.
Next?
Anna, if you understand the problem sufficiently well to be able to state it down a phone line to a tech support person – well, you do not need that tech support person. They know no more than you. It’s always a waste of money. Always.
Try uninstalling every signal shred of HP anything; reboot, switch on printer, plug printer in to Mac. All should be well. Macs are nice BTW but terribly silly.
Couldn’t agree more. As a professional electronics engineer I always found that by the time I understood the problem enough to talk to the manufacturers engineers it was pointless as I then knew more than they did.
Anna, make sure your printer is set to work via wireless – printing a configuration page should tell you if it is enabled or not. Then setup your OS X 10.8 to use AirPrint, http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c03425022&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&os=219&product=4110396&sw_lang= gives the information for doing so. Then, in theory, it should work but just remember that Murphy might put in an appearance.
When did life become so complicated that the common or garden mountain lion (felis concolor) had to start having version numbers.
Is this some kind of new taxonomy that has passed me by?
Probably about the same time that a travelling salesman persuaded a prehistoric man to replace his stone axe-head with a shiny new bronze one. Things have been on the slide ever since.
A bit like Trigger’s Broom…..
http://www.vidoosh.tv/play.php?vid=15083
Blimey! Just got an e-mail from HP ‘executive customer relations’ – they have heard of my problem and want to sort it out for me – I shall keep you all posted…..
The power of the blog eh!
My HP ‘Wireless’ printer decided not to be ‘wireless’ three weeks after the warranty ran out… Grrr!
As a confirmed Luddite, founder member of the Flat Earth Society and a proud user of Windows XP I messed around for ten minutes before… taking the laptop to the printer, using a USB cable, and doing my printing the ‘old fashioned’ (well, quite old fashioned – as it isn’t exactly a Caxton printing press) way.
I reflected that my original computer pottered along quite happily with a couple of 2GB hard drives, whereas a laptop has gadzillions more GB these days. How did we manage? We just did. Are we any better off? No.
I was in a take away last week, picking up a spot of lunch. In the small space with me were three young school age girls, all clearly friends, all out together. Each was staring intently at their own smart phone, lost in their own private world, not a word passed between them. For all I know they were texting each other! My friend made some sage remark about the ”age of conversation being dead’.
He wasn’t wrong I think.
I have a few years old HP computer with a wireless mouse. Sometime after I bought the computer a small light came on on the mouse. Nothing about a light on the mouse in any of the paperwork. I guessed it was probably low battery warning but thought a quick e-mail to HP support would confirm, after all it is not that technical. The response was an instruction to telephone a premium rate number.
It was a low battery warning. The mouse stopped working before I got around to finding new batteries but reco.vered with new batteries.
The last HP product I will buy.
On the HP site I found this info regarding using this printer under OSX 10.8, you have to use AirPrint…
“Introduction
If your printer was set up and working with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or OS X 10.7 Lion, your printer will continue to work as it did before when you update your Mac to the Mountain Lion operating system. The HP printer driver and software you previously installed will update automatically during the Mountain Lion update process.
If you are installing your printer for the first time on a Mac running Mountain Lion, AirPrint is the default method to install and create a printer queue for your printer. Updated HP drivers and software for Mountain Lion are not available for your printer.”
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c03425022&cc=uk&dlc=en&lc=en&os=219&product=4110396&sw_lang=
From Apple Knowledge base we have the following info on AirPrint
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4356
Apple tech support, not the Apple store, will talk you through getting the printer working with you iMac.
Did you buy the Apple extended warranty with your iMac? Worth every penny…
I always buy HP printers and plotters because they always work with my Macs and PC’s…
Hth.
You could try this method…..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa_VO_6xvXk
In the UK an iMAC (along with other Apple computers) comes with 90 days technical support, so if that’s also true in France then even if you didn’t buy Apple’s extended support you still have a chance of getting help.
I bought an iMac three years ago, from the Apple store in Nice, after a lifetime of PCs.
I asked the salesman for the telephone help number(s).
He asked me what for?
I told him that things go wrong with new computers, a telephone helpline number is an essential.
He told me that didn’t apply to Macs, al that I had to do was take the thing home (in it’s anonymous brown box) open up the box, plug it in and it would work. Nothing would go wrong with it.
So I did.
That was three years ago.
Nothing went wrong with it.
I’m typing this on it.
I bought an Epsom inkjet printer at the same time.
That was compatible with the iMac and they have worked happily together ever since.
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