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Hewlett Packard turns Vista into Profits
By Brian | March 15, 2007 | Share on Facebook
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been a Windows Vista user for about a month now.
When I find some time, I’ll post a detailed review. This, however, warranted special mention. From Hewlett Packard’s Products site on my HP Scanjet 5400c:
We are sorry to inform you that there will be no Windows Vista support available for your HP product. Therefore your product will not work with Windows Vista.
The majority of HP products not supported in Windows Vista are beyond seven years old. If you are using the Windows Vista operating system on your computer, please consider upgrading to a newer HP product that is supported on Windows Vista.
HP has numerous products on the market that support Windows Vista:
http://www.hp.com/united-states/tradein/home_flash.html
I don’t know exactly when I bought my scanner, but my old PC is four years old, and the scanner came after the PC, so it’s significantly younger than “the majority.” Also, I clicked on the Trade-In link, only to see this:
The product you have entered does not have an aftermarket trade value. You may want to consider one of the disposal options below.
My options at this point seem to be: a) put the scanner in my son’s room (with the old PC) and go up to his bedroom whenever I need to scan, or b) buy a new scanner.
Plan A would be a no-brainer, except that I hate to take up desk space in my son’s room for something he’ll hardly ever use. I’ll probably swing by Best Buy or some such store this weekend and see if I can find a really cheap (read: <$100) scanner for the office. If not, we’ll go with Plan A.
In any case, isn’t it interesting that HP took such subtle advantage of the opportunity Windows Vista presented it, by basically declaring the back-end of their product pipeline dead on arrival? Writing Vista drivers for these devices could not be that expensive. By not bothering, they simply decided to screw over their old customers and force them to spend some money to replace something that’s working just fine as it is.
So that’s how it’s going to be, HP? OK, noted…
Topics: Tech Talk | 3 Comments »
On your 4GB Windows Vista Ultimate PC, install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (free), install XP (have a spare license?) within a virtual machine, and install your scanner driver on XP. If it works, you can do your scanning from within the virtual PC. Not too convenient, but how often do you scan?
This could be the early ROI for the investment in 4GB RAM and Vista Ultimate (which is the only consumer version of Vista that runs Virtual PC.)
At this point, I put the scanner in Avery’s room. It takes up a lot of his dresser (right next to the desk), but it’s not like he needed the space right now anyway. Worst case, I can always put it in the closet & just plug it into the PC when I actually need to scan something…
We’ll see if Best Buy has a really good deal on scanners. It still pains me to own two, given how little I actually use it (them?)
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