Using an HP PSC 1210 with Snow Leopard

I've had an HP PSC 1210 printer/scanner/copier for several years now. It has printed thousands pages of documents ranging from Christmas letters with envelopes to photos that are currently decorate the walls of my home. It's also scanned in hundreds of pages of bank statements, invoices, and other documents in service to my ongoing quest to minimize clutter and paper in my home office. I've always been pleased with the hardware. It's fast enough for my needs, and I've never had any complaints about the output of the printer or the scanner. It doesn't take up much space on my desk, and I even like how the device looks.

The software, however, has always been a source of frustration. Mac OS X has never recognized scanner the way one would expect, so features such as Preview's "Import from scanner" command never see the hardware; I expect Photoshop also has this problem. This requires me to use HP's inelegant scanning software and utilities, which, while functional, are far from easy or efficient to use. Reading various posts on various Apple, HP, and other support sites suggest I'm far from alone in my frustration.

More importantly, the only drivers that work for this device and provide both printing and scanning are on the CD that came with the PSC 1210; I have never gotten the drivers available on the HP Web site to work, despite that software being a newer version. This is a problem, because every time I've upgraded the OS on my Mac (from Tiger to Leopard, and more recently to Snow Leopard) the printer drivers get removed, forcing me to find the CD again.

Installing the drivers from the CD has produced another issue; every time a user logs in after the drivers have been reinstalled, the HP Setup Assistant loads. No matter how many times one closes it or completes the setup, the next time you log in, it pops right back up.

Thankfully, there is a solution to this:

1. Quit the HP Setup Assistant
2. Delete the file /Library/Preferences/Hewlett-Packard Preferences/com.hp.setupassistant
3. Restart the computer

Despite my annoyances with the software for the PSC 1210, I'll certainly look at another all-in-one from HP when this printer finally needs to be replaced. In the meantime, I'll just keep the installation CD where I can find it; when OS X 10.7 shows up, I'm sure I'll to once again reinstall the drivers.