This is going to require some story.

Sometime ago, I bought what was said to be an unused HP LaserJet M234dwe printer/scanner that someone bought for over $200 in 2021. I got it for $10 at a thrift store. Whether or not it was unused, that’s anyone’s debate (it didn’t have the box so right away I was skeptical). What I thought was a great deal, in hindsight would later turn to be frustrating with a company that has long degraded from its simpler days.

I didn’t know it already have a toner in it, which made me having to go find and buy another one a spared cost. So, about a few days ago, I went to try and get it to print. It wouldn’t print. It’d just turn on, seemingly budge the paper inside and won’t do a thing. I tried everything I thought I could, from using HP’s bloated mess of an app they have called HP Smart (or HP Dumbingly Frustrating) to trying to work around the basics of making the printer work with Windows 10 with proprietary drivers.

Still wouldn’t print a single page, both testing and just a demo page. So I call HP tech support and I had two rounds with them, both ending in unresolved cases. I was informed that because this machine is out of warranty, which I didn’t care, and if I needed extended support, I would have to pay $20 for paid technical support. Additionally, the other option was to pay monthly for a newer printer.

Both options were out of the question for me, because the problem wasn’t just because the printer wasn’t printing, but also the HP shitty app couldn’t be bothered to register my printer because there’s some unknown connection timeout with their shitty cloud servers or something. So I took to the HP site to try and bring the issue there. During the midst of my frustration, I worked around what I could say about how utterly useless and careless HP is. That is what lead to the banning here in this image and I don’t regret it.

This is what HP has degraded to, all this time. Moral of the story - get a printer that’s not HP.