HP printers

I've had a number of Hewlett Packard printers, when I purchased the most recent an HP Photosmart D5460 it was the best print quality available for under £200.

Why is it that they have some enormous, complex, unreliable drivers.

It's connected by USB - when connected to the PC it works 95% of the time whilst on the laptop it works 10% of the time and I usually give up. Both operating systems are Windows 7 both work fine - it's only the printer that plays up.

I've now discovered a fix that seems to have worked successfully to date - so, when I turn the printer on the PC brings up the message "USB Device Not Recognized" and it rebooting doesn't change the situation.

What I've found is that deleting "USB Composite Devices" from Device manager solves the problem.

Simple.

Windows 7 Jump Lists

I've been having problems in that my jump lists seem to work perfectly except on Excel 2007 that I use all the time - it's jumplist contains one item that never changes & unfortunately is not something I use often.

It turns out that the jump list files can get corrupted, so the easy answer is to bin the whole lot and start again - so just delete the files in %AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations.


Alternatively, a more methodical but less reliable approach is to just delete the large files found in there -they appear to be files that have become corrupted.

SQL Server Install Error

I've had the following error a couple of times when installing SQL Server :


sql server failed to obtain system account information for the aspnet account... 


The solution is in a dos prompt to goto c:\windows\framework\v2.0.xxxx (you'll have to check what xxxx is on your machine) and then type


aspnet_regiis -i


Has worked everytime so far.