It appears HP is getting more and more aggressive with the registration of their products and forcing people to create an account just to use their printers.
Ive been working on this printer for someone that I set up a few months ago, it is an HP laserjet m110w and one of their more cheaper consumer models. At the time I was able to install it with no issues, but today the user contacted me to say that it was not printing. When I looked at the computer, all the drivers were gone. I thought that was a bit odd and I doubt anyone using it had uninstalled the driver.
Anyway, I went to HP to download the latest driver, this one is supposed to be the full offline driver package, but note how it says "HP easy start" on the file name despite it being labelled for offline use.
https://support.hp.com/nz-en/drivers/sel...l/30190476
"Installation Software and Full/Basic Driver-Supports print and scan functionality only"
Now perhaps I have to disconnect the LAN from the internet to force it into installing the driver without an account(I cant as i was working through teamviewer), but im sure in the past there has always been an option to skip registering (in small print in the corner) when installing the driver package.
But this time round it is basically forcing me to register and says that you have to create an account to use this product. (it now seems to be called HP+ when it was running the install)
In the end I just used 7-zip and extracted the driver out of the installation package and could run the manual setup from the files it contained, but the printer would now say out of paper (with a fully loaded tray), but it was communicating successfully.
I thought I would log into the printers web interface through the browser and there was this message:
"Check your account. A problem has occurred with your HP account and you will be unable to print very soon unless the issue is resolved. To learn more, open the HP Smart app or visit www.hpsmart.com and sign in to your account."
Now the weird thing is that this message seems to be related to HP instant ink subscriptions or something along these lines. Either way I know there has never been an account created to begin with, and a quick google search is showing people with the same issue and only being told to sort out their ink subscription that they never had or want to ask for. I suspect this could be a reason for the out of paper message, but I think I might need to physically look at the printer and perform a factory reset and then reconnect it
I dont recommend people purchase HP consumer printers anyway, but it seems a common theme with many products these days that they ever force users to register an account to use their products or at the very least make it difficult to do so without.
Ive been working on this printer for someone that I set up a few months ago, it is an HP laserjet m110w and one of their more cheaper consumer models. At the time I was able to install it with no issues, but today the user contacted me to say that it was not printing. When I looked at the computer, all the drivers were gone. I thought that was a bit odd and I doubt anyone using it had uninstalled the driver.
Anyway, I went to HP to download the latest driver, this one is supposed to be the full offline driver package, but note how it says "HP easy start" on the file name despite it being labelled for offline use.
https://support.hp.com/nz-en/drivers/sel...l/30190476
"Installation Software and Full/Basic Driver-Supports print and scan functionality only"
Now perhaps I have to disconnect the LAN from the internet to force it into installing the driver without an account(I cant as i was working through teamviewer), but im sure in the past there has always been an option to skip registering (in small print in the corner) when installing the driver package.
But this time round it is basically forcing me to register and says that you have to create an account to use this product. (it now seems to be called HP+ when it was running the install)
In the end I just used 7-zip and extracted the driver out of the installation package and could run the manual setup from the files it contained, but the printer would now say out of paper (with a fully loaded tray), but it was communicating successfully.
I thought I would log into the printers web interface through the browser and there was this message:
"Check your account. A problem has occurred with your HP account and you will be unable to print very soon unless the issue is resolved. To learn more, open the HP Smart app or visit www.hpsmart.com and sign in to your account."
Now the weird thing is that this message seems to be related to HP instant ink subscriptions or something along these lines. Either way I know there has never been an account created to begin with, and a quick google search is showing people with the same issue and only being told to sort out their ink subscription that they never had or want to ask for. I suspect this could be a reason for the out of paper message, but I think I might need to physically look at the printer and perform a factory reset and then reconnect it
I dont recommend people purchase HP consumer printers anyway, but it seems a common theme with many products these days that they ever force users to register an account to use their products or at the very least make it difficult to do so without.