You asshats. You totally incompetent software engineers. It is called a “peripheral” because it is not necessary to the central functioning of my computer, and I happen to fucking like it that way.
Let me elaborate: this weekend I was at my future mother-in-law’s house typing lists of people to invite to the wedding. Congratulate or sympathize with me as you see fit – some other time, though. I typed up the list on my laptop because her machine is old, runs Win98, and occasionally I outpace the computer’s ability to handle text inputs. So I had to plug my laptop into her printer to give her a hard copy.
The Lexmark 4200 series connects to a PC through a standard USB interface. Since Windows XP is so good at recognizing plug-and-play hardware, I figured this would be a snap. No, it’s never that simple. Apparently I needed to insert the printer’s driver CD. No problem, I was the one who installed the printer on her Win98 machine, so I knew where it was. However, here is the first portion of my rant:
I. Pitting The First: Lexmark’s Printers Do Not Conform To a Standard USB Plug-and-play Interface.
So I install the drivers. It took about five minutes, which gave me time to wonder what additional “helpful” software those motherfuckers thought I’d want in order to Manage My Lexmark Printing Experience. I knew, just knew, that there would be additional cruft, and resigned myself to it. I figured, “I’ll just install, print, and uninstall.” I clicked Print, and a colorful display popped up in the lower right hand corner showing me her toner levels, and a bar graph with the printing progress. A cheery voice from my fucking speakers chirped “Printing Has Started!!” LOOK, you asshats. It’s a printer. Printers print. If they were meant to talk, they’d be called “Printer-Talkers” or come with built-in speakers. If it was meant to be an artificially intelligent machine that shits documents, it would be called a “Docutron 9000 Home Paper Wizard” or some shit. And I would never let it touch my machine in the first place. The “drivers” are meant to DRIVE the printer. I should not – and in fact, I do not – require an additional, Lexmark-branded software package to manage my printing; that’s what my FUCKING OPERATING SYSTEM is for. And the fact that my processing cycles and hard drive are being used to play a WAV file every time I print pisses me off more than I can possibly state here, so I will simply enumerate:
II. Pitting The Second: Lexmark’s Printer Requires the installation of a “driver” that is actually a wholly unnecessary software based Print Manager Solution. It plays WAV files which unnecessarily thrash my hard drive and slow down my productivity, while simultaneously pissing me off.
This would be enough to form a totally rational, completely justified pitting on its own. I was so angry at Lexmark I almost put my fist through the printer. I took the CD out of my machine immediately. I uninstalled the driver. “Are you sure?” Fucking A, I’m sure. I rebooted, and then I searched for and deleted every Lexmark DLL, EXE, SYS, INI, and so on that it had installed – since uninstalling didn’t bother to do that for me. I rebooted the laptop again, and breathed a sigh of relief, because now it would never torment me again.
Wrong. Oh, so fucking wrong. You asshats, you devil-worshipping cunt-maggots, do you have stock in a company that makes high blood pressure medication? Does your tech support line mail you kickbacks if your bug makes the top ten?
I got back to the office yesterday and tried to print, and Windows said that I didn’t have any printers installed. I knew. I knew right-fucking-away that Lexmark had somehow removed them all. So I clicked “Add Printer” and it wouldn’t. It said that it couldn’t add a printer because the print spooler service wasn’t running. So I went into Services and tried to manually start the print spooler service. Already I was deeper into the guts of my machine than Joe User would dare go – Visions of troubleshooting this problem for my mother-in-law or other relatives flashed through my head, and steam began to waft from my crimson ears. The print spooler service would not start because it had “Dependencies.” I looked up its dependencies, and what-do-you-fucking-know?
III. Pitting The Third: Lexmark’s printer driver forces WinXP’s Print Spooler Service to be completely dependent on the existence and successful operation of a Lexmark-branded service, even after you uninstall the Lexmark printer. Removal of the now-unnecessary driver or service cripples your ability to print to ANY printer.
I had to edit my goddamn registry to pull the thick, lumpy cock of the Lexmark driver out of the print spooler’s tight and ill-fitting anal orifice. This is so far beyond the knowledge of an average user, and the consequences so crippling, that I feel utterly justified in referring to Lexmark’s “driver” software as a virus.
To reiterate: the hell-spawned piece of viral software to which I refer fails to take advantage of the simple and elegant interface provided, it installs orders of magnitude more software than is necessary to drive a printer’s functionality, and when removed, it cripples critical operating system components. There is no way that even a seasoned user can install it in such a way that this is not the result, and only a seasoned user can fix the problems that result from its typical functioning.
You cock-biting, goat-felching, drug-addled, and utterly incompetent sub-human fecal waste: you dare to call yourselves engineers? You ought to be sodomized with shards of your hellaciously virulent and malevolent install CDs until you’ve apologized to each of your users alphabetically; until every Lexmark printer operates in a standard plug-and-play mode, you should be whipped with USB cables as a recording of your printer’s voice cheerily mutters “You were a waste of perfectly good semen,” over and over.
Fuck you all.
