Back in September, I decided I was going to try and keep all my company documents in electronic format for easy filing. Sure, I’d keep all the originals in my fire safe, but I wanted to be able to pull up anything at a moment’s notice and e-mail/fax it as necessary from wherever I was. I decided I needed a good scanner with an auto document feeder.
Enter the HP ScanJet 5590. Looked good, wasn’t too expensive, was rated for light office work, I thought I had found a winner. So I ordered, received and installed the little beastie on my Dell Precision M4100. And then disappointment set in.
I managed to scan one document as a “test” that night, but since then I have not been able to scan anything. I keep getting the HP updates, and still no joy. Today I received the update to HP Solution Center 13, and with it the hope that my problems would just go away. Negative. More problems ensue.
The install seemed to go as planned, but at the end it immediately rebooted my computer. No message or confirmation message box, just boom! Now everytime I restart the machine, I spend the next 5 minutes clicking ‘Cancel’ when something called “TrayApp” repeatedly attempts to find the .msi that has been deleted from the machine’s temp directory. It seems they installed right from the temp directory, and rebooted before the “TrayApp” could completely finish installing. I am not the only poor soul that has encountered this issue, it is well covered on HP’s support forums, with little or no words of wisdom that I can find from HP themselves. The consensus seems to be “reinstall the drivers”.
This is not the only problem I’ve had with this particular suite of software. When I installed the scanner, I had hooked it to a USB port on the back of the laptop. When I finally moved the scanner into my office, I hooked it to the back of my docking station. The HP software proceeded to recognize it as “HP ScanJet 5590 #2“. Excellent. I removed the #2 device in Device Manager and hooked the scanner up to another USB port on the laptop itself and got the same result. Apparently, the drivers are sticky with respect to the particular USB port on which the scanner is installed.
When I decided to ignore this little annoyance and perform a scan, sometimes the scanning would appear to hang, other times I would get a message on the screen telling me there were some kind of communications issues with the device.
I have had relatively good experiences with HP’s equipment in the past, and the scanner itself looks to be fairly well made, but I have to take issue with HP’s drivers and/or applications. Currently, I am uninstalling all the HP drivers and apps on my M4100, and I’m going to attempt to re-install using a full-setup I downloaded from HP. Will this solve my problems and renew my faith in HP?
More news later…
Well, here’s the news.
The reinstall seems to have made the software happy, it no longer complains. It didn’t fix the scanner.
Entertaining a “what if”, I took out the nice expensive gold-plated 16-foot USB cable that I had bought at Staples (Staples brand, btw) so that I could get a little more slack and substituted back in the USB cable that came with the scanner and the scanner started working again.
Apparently not all USB cables are created equal!