Today was a good technology day... nice way to start this blog. I've got an HP LaserJet 3055 All-In-One printer and have been fairly happy with it. Besides printing/copying, I use it pretty heavily for scanning articles, images, drawings, so that I can save them and/or email them to business associates.
Well, today, it stopped scanning for no apparent reason. Now this is actually not a good thing -- why does working technology just stop working? Not very reliable... but that's another story.
I did my own troubleshooting but got nowhere. So I went to the HP website, found the InstantSupport links, and eventually found the "Live Chat" option. [Note to HP: The pages were so busy that I really had to search for what I wanted... much more challenging than it should be. Krug's book "Don't Make Me Think" would be a good resource.]
Having finally found the Live Chat option, I expected the frequent drill on these sites of answering tons of questions -- the interview checklist, if you will -- before I could get into the meat of solving the problem. Pleasantly enough, there were only a very few questions and a couple of quick tests and I was directed to a download to "Fix scanning" -- and it did, first time.
The most difficult part of the exercise was moving the printer to get the Part Number. The configuration printout from the device amazingly doesn't show this! [Another Note to HP: Put this information on the printouts, please.]
Total time to solution: less than 15 minutes. Congratulations, HP!
