HP printers are absolutely awful now in terms of their PITA setup, obtuse smart setup exe’s instead of drivers, stupid drm or subscription lock stuff like this. We do not supply or recommend them any more (IT company).
How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps
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Re: How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps
#32It's not even the idiotic DRM that gets me so triggered about this - I'm sure most of us have been in a situation with corporate support where someone is genuienly trying to help but their own tools don't work, their support pages don't load, and the tech team is no more knowledgeable than a random wiki article. Like, with the DVD drives you also had a built-in region lock into every drive but changing it could be accomplished in about 30 seconds and yes there was also a global limit on number of changes. Why go through this insane process of giving support dozen different numbers they type into some keygen - it feels crazy.
Re: How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps
#33It has always annoyed me that "region settings" don't just take into account the realities of the situation; they're OBVIOUSLY designed to prevent people in "rich" countries from buying media designated for "poor" countries in a form of market segmentation; but that should mean the "rich media" should just work in all devices. Of course now things like the players are so cheap you can just buy multiple if you want to…
I’m pretty sure off-brand ink would not have worked at all. That’s the whole purpose of the DRM — HP cannot tolerate that someone buys non-original cartridges, or refills them.
Re: How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps
#34This story tells me I made the right decision: Never ever buy a printer. I can print in the library. Since Covid started I needed to do that twice: The first time they had stopped accepting cash because of the infection risk(!). And I loaded 2 Euros on my library card for 10 pages but obviously did not use all of them. The second time they were surprised that I had money on my library card. To be fair I have printed…
For those of us who need to print a bit more often, my advice is to buy a black and white laser printer for ~$40 on Craigslist and you'll get years of cheap, reliable occasional printing in your own home while you use up the rest of the toner cartridge that came with it. When it breaks you can probably find another one in the same price range.
I'm going to advise against this. Most people selling their printer are doing so out of frustration due to paper jams or other nonsense. I have gotten 2 used printers out of not wanting to generate e-waste, only to have constant printer jams and other frustrations leading to me having to just print at the grocery store instead.
"That Brother printer" will cost you more (and be Yet Another Plastic Thing To Go To A Landfill Later), but will ... print every time. Sure, after a while you might need to clean the rollers or something, but at least you know it will be that and not some random bricking.
Re: How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps
#35I went through a similar problem with an expensive wifi 6 cable modem router (Netgear Nighthawk CAX80). Spent too much money on it ($400 if I remember rightly) for better internet connectivity from xfinity. Worked well until I moved back to the UK, shipping it across in a container, only to discover that it's not only region locked but if it cannot detect an American-style cable connection, it gets stuck in a reboot…
Oh and don't even get me started on trying to change regions on online accounts and the inconsistencies involved in doing so. Airbnb and Etsy, easy to change. PayPal and PlayStation online account, had to create a new account.
The reason for this often is that the service works differently for different regions and depending on how it was implemented (as in launched quickly not thinking of multiple scenarios) you may have an account with US activity (transactions, kyc details, reporting, etc) that would be messed up if they simply switched the country flag on your account. So often customer support doesn’t even have the capability to do that, and the request has to go all the way to product managers and sent down to devs to handle just this one account. And a dev might suggest making this process easier and letting the customer do that themselves (requires streamlining reporting, transaction processing, etc), and this will be shot down because the estimated cost is much higher that processing this “one off” request. And this will repeat for all such one offs.
Re: How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps
#36Who has so much free time? Easy solution: - return cartridges since they do not work in "compatible" printer. Consumer laws do not care about small print or region locks - go to unauthorized shop and have original cartridges refiled. I recycled cartridge like that for several years.
Not sure refilling works with HP’s DRM-equipped cartridges. I think they will refuse to print once their counter shows 0, no matter if there’s ink inside.
Re: How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps
#37HP printers are absolutely awful now in terms of their PITA setup, obtuse smart setup exe’s instead of drivers, stupid drm or subscription lock stuff like this. We do not supply or recommend them any more (IT company).
Can you recommend a printer or brand? Or else enumerate all the bad ones? ;)
Re: How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps
#38HP is another of many examples how MBAs in their search for ever growing "value" can gradually destroy a company that owes its success to great engineering.
Re: How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps
#39Who has so much free time? Easy solution: - return cartridges since they do not work in "compatible" printer. Consumer laws do not care about small print or region locks - go to unauthorized shop and have original cartridges refiled. I recycled cartridge like that for several years.
Not sure refilling works with HP’s DRM-equipped cartridges. I think they will refuse to print once their counter shows 0, no matter if there’s ink inside.
You have to keep or swap DRM chip. But I am in EU, not really sure about US.
Re: How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps
#40HP printers are absolutely awful now in terms of their PITA setup, obtuse smart setup exe’s instead of drivers, stupid drm or subscription lock stuff like this. We do not supply or recommend them any more (IT company).
Can you recommend a printer or brand? Or else enumerate all the bad ones? ;)
I like Brothers or Xeroxs, or even Epsons.