-By Warner Todd Huston
A major problem has arisen for many Snow Leopard installers! Mac has shipped the update for Snow Leopard, System 10.6 and there is something that everyone must know BEFORE you do the update!
Of course, this instal will not work on any Mac that does not have the Intel chip, so that is the first thing to be aware of. But there is a second thing that will screw you up if you aren’t aware of it…
YOUR PRINTER MIGHT NEVER WORK WITH SNOW LEOPARD!
That’s right. Especially if you have an HP printer. First of all, many printers have yet to update their driver lists for Snow Leopard. But HP, for one, has announced they will NOT be updating the driver for most of their printers, especially the older ones.
Here is the helpful, helpful message on the HP site:
We are sorry to inform you that there will be no Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) support available for your HP product. Therefore your product will not work with Mac OS X 10.6.
And HP is helpfully suggesting you buy a new printer to solve this dilemma.
Isn’t that nice of them? Offering for you to buy a new printer like that?
I mean, come on. How much effort is it to create a driver update? Jeeze, they do it for stinkin’ Microsoft every third day of the week!
So, you must check the website of the company that made your printer and see about a printer driver update BEFORE you install Snow Leopard. You may have to buy a new printer if you have an HP printer. So, be advised.
Unfortunately, I just found this all out the hard way.
Do a little googling. Frequently the UNIX community will produce drivers that HP does not. And even the onces HP does provide, the UNIX boys will put out something better.
Snow Leopard is working fine on my machine, though I had to reinstall my Canon Printer Driver. Haven’t noticed any significant performance improvement though.
I wouldn’t know where to find such folks. I’ll try and look around.