Back in March, I wrote a post entitled My Own Ten Peeves About the Mac. The last of the ten was the need for Apple to tackle printer/scanner/etc. driver issues more aggressively:

“10. Third-party driver issues. I know this, too, isn’t really Apple’s fault, but I’ve read of so many people having problems with scanners, multi-function devices, etc., that the plug-and-play capability of the Mac seems seriously threatened. I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist” who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. I also wonder if the Intel transition will make this situation better or worse.”

In the eight months since I wrote that, I’ve continued to see problems with printers. I’ve recently upgraded my Mac to one running the newest OS X (10.4.8), and still haven’t managed to get my laser printer to work. It isn’t some odd-ball model either, but an HP 1320. I had to mess with it a fair amount as well on my last Mac, which ran 10.2.

The key point here is that chasing down driver problems is a huge waste of time. I’ve spent probably 12 or more hours on the latest case, over the course of a week, which is worse than usual, but not as much as you might think. Other problems have typically drained an afternoon or so of my time, maybe once a year in recent years, something which never used to happen with the Mac in times past.

What’s particularly frustrating is that in theory, it’s supposed to be very easy (pretty much automatic in many cases) to set up a printer on a Mac, using the Printer Setup Utility or Print Center (as it used to be called). Unfortunately, the diagnostics are extremely weak.

If you do run into a problem, there’s almost nothing to help you on the Mac itself. The latest problem apparently - this message only appears intermittently - involves some sort of stoppage of “hppostprocessing, status 2″. I’ve checked the Apple Discussions and other places on the net, tried perhaps a half dozen or more things, with no success so far.

I’m fairly technically inclined, though not a computer geek, and wonder what average Mac users do in this sort of situation. Even the technical types on the forums often claim to have spent many hours troubleshooting their printer problems.

If others have had similar experiences, I’d like to hear about them. This seems like a situation that is getting worse rather than better. It’s also made me very reluctant to take the plunge on a scanner, even though my wife has been bugging me to get one for some time. Scanners are fairly cheap now, but I really don’t want to get stuck troubleshooting another bunch of problems!

I just want it to work, without getting in my way, which is why I bought a Mac in the first place.