Trying to instal photosmart C4380

Photosmart C4380: good hardware, appalling software. Shameful that it's on the market at all.

WIRELESS PROBLEM

You have to install the printer as USB first. Then, once it's all installed, load up the CD again and 'Add device', choosing the wireless option. It's crucial that you leave your USB cable in the whole time. Take it out right at the end. Once you've added a device, you'll have two printers installed. One will be called 'Copy 1' - that's the wireless one. It should all work okay, and you can delete the USB one.

SCAN PROBLEM AND ERROR MESSAGES

When I did this everything seemed to work fine. BUT - after a wee while the software started playing up. The scan function didn't work at all, HP was depositing all sorts of bugs all over my computer, I had error messages coming up at shutdown, all sorts of gremlins.

So this is what I did.

I totally uninstalled all HP software.

I downloaded the updated Photosmart Basic Drivers from the HP website. They are here: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareCategory?product=3221646&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&submit.y=11&submit.x=9&lang=en&cc=us

Once you've downloaded the file and run it, the new drivers will be installed but NO SOFTWARE. Again, you have to do the whole setting it up as USB and then leaving the cable in and adding the device wirelessly. But if you do this with the HP drivers and ignore the installation CD, then everything should work perfectly.

Of course this means no HP software at all. But who needs it? I use Microsoft's scanning software, which is fine, and it has no problem printing.

Basically HP's software is BLOATWARE that doesn't even work. It screws up your computer.

Good luck!!