Hewlett Packard PSC 2210 four-in-one printer - printer hangs - must reboot system to clear the problem

Complaints.com received the following consumer message on February 25, 2003:

From: Jean Blu [Email User]

RE: Hewlett Packard PSC 2210 four-in-one printer - printer hangs - must reboot system to clear the problem Product HP PSC 2210 four-in-one printer.

I purchased the printer as the "latest technology" and excellent photo printing quality at Staples, for $400.00. Since the purchase in October I have made 3 calls to HP tech for service because the printer "hangs up" my

system and I must hard boot to clear out the problem.

I would have made more calls, but when calling HP tech - you must pay for the phone call, there is no 800

number. And waiting on the line for 45 minutes and more to talk to someone gets mighty expensive.

The first call resulted in my being told that it is not the printer, my "bus" is too slow. I discussed

this at length with the guys at Staples, who basically told me that the HP tech was an idiot.

The second call resulted in a somewhat more civil suggestion, that I clean up my disk. (I have two hard

drives. I was advised that anything more than windows on the same drive as the HP printer software would

cause the printer to have problems. I moved everything but windows from my 10 mg to my 80 mg drive.) This

did seem to help a bit, but by no means resolved the problem Then, I felt brave enough to see what would happen if I printed photos, since this is supposed to be the

most fantastic photo printer around. Big mistake. The photos turned out looking like crap - because I

had not purchased the optional "photo cartridge". Even the addition of this $25.00 add-on didn't help. Another call for service resulted in being told that "the printer just doesn't print some things" and that

I should simply copy everything I want to print over into word and then print from that format. This is

not a convenient/customer friendly solution and does not guarantee that the printer will not hang up the

system. Today, I discovered, not only does the printer have a problem with some Word documents, most web pages and some Excel stuff, it refuses to print PDF documents. So, I called HP again and told them I wanted to speak to whoever I needed to to get a full refund on this piece of junk. I was sweetly advised by the Executive

Offices that they can not authorize such a thing and will not even consider it until they have replace the

printer at least 3 times! I told her I have never been offered a replacement and should have met the 3 replacement quota by now, since it has been so long. I was told, all they would do for me is to send my

information along to a 'case manager' to deal with. So, here I sit with an expensive piece of junk.