tenpastmidnight blog

I've upgraded my iBook to OSX 10.4 (Tiger), which has fixed the problem with the wifi not coming back after it going to sleep, but has caused me some other hassles, some of which are my own fault and some of which aren't.

My ageing HP Deskjet 640c stopped working properly - printing would give me a page where lines were missing, and the tops of letters on lines which did print were missing the top few points of their letters. Joy.

Sevan suggested I try the 'Gimp' drivers that come with 10.4, which I had and they hadn't made any difference. But I tried them again after upgrading to 10.4.3, and they've worked. Which is great and I can print invoices again (very handy, as a freelancer.)

To get the printer working with the Gimp drivers, this is what I did:

First I followed HP's advice and 'Reset Printing System' in the Printer Setup Utility.

I then plugged the printer in and used 'Add' which found the printer automatically. Down where it says 'Print Using: HP Inkjet 2.7.1' I clicked on the drop down list and chose 'HP', then on the list that appears I chose 'HP DeskJet 600/600C - GimpPrint v5.0.0-beta2' I also renamed the 'Name:' field so I knew it was the Gimp driver. Then it started working fine.