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Originally Posted by Deskisamess
Has the Windows print spooler ever worked seamlessly? I have learned over the years to not waste time trying to fix a munged up printer install. Removal and starting over was always the thing to do, especially with one of the HP inkjet we used to have.
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No, but it's better now than it was.
Oddly, the problems I had with the old HP printer seemed to be on the HP software end. I've used and administered a lot of HP printers over the years. Generally, they've Just Worked, but the software on the Windows end that installed the printer driver and Windows control interface for that model just wasn't that good. What jammed the Windows print spooler seemed to be on the HP end. (And it was the HP software on the desktop that you used to try to cancel, pause, or restart print jobs. It communicated with the Windows spooler, and seemed to have problems doing so.)
The current machine is
much better behaved.
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This Brother laser has been fairly rock solid, except for the iDevices which can't always wake it up wirelessly. But addressing the printer via the browser usually took care of that.
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At least you
can wake it via the browser.
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This was weird because it installed correctly, and the laptop saw the printer correctly. It just wouldn't print, but there was no error message or anything. I'm just glad the fix was easy. I'm pretty happy with the HP Pavilion laptop. The keyboard is great, and it's pretty snappy.
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The current desktop is a recycled ex-corporate workstation. My former desktop suffered a failure, and Microcenter had the one I use now on sale for $275. It came with Win10 Pro pre-installed, a quad-core i5-4690 CPU at 3.5ghz with a turbo mode up to 3.9ghz, 16GB RAM, Intel HD 4600 graphics (more than adequate for my non-gaming usage), USB3, and a 256GB Lexar SSD. 16GB RAM is nice. The machine
can be expanded to 32GB but I've had no need to think about doing it. If I see a quarter of current installed RAM used, it's unusual. But it means I can do things like install a 64 bit Windows RAMdisk driver with RAM to allocate to it. My Firefox cache is on a 256MB RAMdisk. (Firefox makes it easy to specify where it should put cache. Chrome is more complicated.)
No SATA HD was a bit bemusing, but ex-corporate explained it. In its prior life it was a corporate desktop that would connect across the network to storage that would appear as mapped drives. It didn't need
local storage - just a fast system drive to hold OS and applications. But there was room to install a couple of SATA HDs from the previous machine, and I did so, as well as adding WiFi and Bluetooth via dongles.
The 240GB Crucial SSD I got for the earlier machine resides in a parts drawer till I get something else to use it in.
Keyboards are special pain points. You get accustomed to a particular keyboard and muscle memory is acquired. If you have to change to a different keyboard, productivity drops into the toilet because muscle memory is wrong. I prefer Logitech keyboards for that reason. I dislike using laptops precisely because I'm not comfortable with laptop keyboards (and I
despise trackpads. If I have to use a laptop, a USB mouse is a necessity.)
Likely next addition for the desktop is a second monitor. I
think I might be able to fit a second 21" monitor in the space where the computer desk is. I'm finding reason to participate in virtual conferencing where a second monitor will make like much easier. (I can
participate with one. If I am called upon to monitor and control Zoom and Discord instances (likely), I really need a second.)
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Dennis