Setting up a printer these days should be a walk in the park. After all, these things have been around for nearly as long as PCs have been in homes.
Yet, my latest adventure with HP’s Officejet 6700 Premium, an all-in-one inkjet printer, should give that thought some pause. I only just got it to work properly, several hours after I took it out of the box.
I’ve always liked HP for its build quality. Plus the S$369 printer comes with a document feeder (great for SOHOs, when scanning contracts) and dual-sided printing (that helps save paper). There’s also a nifty touch-screen, instead of the old one-line displays.
The problem was with the firmware. The version that came out of the box kept dropping the wired connection to the rest of my home network, essentially cutting me off from most tasks.
Try scanning, and it would tell me the connection was lost. Printouts also failed, because the printer could not be contacted. Strangely, the printer often seemed to be connected because it had an IP address most of the time.
Since it worked intermittently, I tried to troubleshoot one item at at time. I reinstalled the drivers, checked my Ethernet cable, rebooted my router and even tried updating the firmware from my PC, but the efforts all failed to solve the problem.
In the end, I had to improvise with the installation. Here’s what I’d advise.
Before connecting it to your network, hook up the Officejet 6700 Premium to your PC via USB first. Then install the drivers and update the firmware from there. Only after this do you hook it up via the network.
The firmware version I am using now is MPM3CN1232AR, which I downloaded from the HP Singapore website.
Fortunately, I’ve since been able to scan and print without issues. So if you are planning to buy one of these all-in-one machines, prepare to get the firmware updated.
