Ok, I'm going to do something here that is a little bit out of character for me. No, I'm going to do something that is WAY out of character for me. I'm going to use this thread as a place to climb on my soapbox and blow off a little steam. And since it relates directly to this build thread I won't feel bad about doing it here.

I HATE HEWLETT PACKARD

Before I say way let me tell you a bit of my history. My wife and I own and run a computer shop. No fancy terms for it, it's a local computer shop and we've been doing this for 10 years now. I do a lot of network consulting for businesses in town and my wife handles all the of the personal computers that people bring in the front door. So we have the perfect background for me to say this, we've been watching first hand how HP equipment has been changing over the last few years. In the 6 months or so we've been noticing how much useless software gets loaded on a computer when a HP printer is installed, and this bothered us too. But tonight was the final straw.

I have a HP 7660 photosmart printer. One of the features of the printer is that it has card slots in it so you can use the printer to download pictures off of the card from a digital camera. Normally I will just plug a USB cable in the camera when I want to download it, but I've found that when there are a lot of pictures on the card the camera will actually power down (battery saving feature) before I get all the pictures downloaded. When I have a lot of pictures I will put the card in the printer and download them from there. So I put the card in the printer, get an error. Remove the card and make sure the contacts are clean and make sure there is nothing in the printer slot, all good. Put the card back in, same error. Ok, consult HP.com. Standard answer, reload the software. So I reload the drivers. Put the card back in, same error. One last try, I lift the end of the card up while I slide it in to make sure it makes good contact with the metal contacts. Bingo, it sees the card. I start to transfer the pictures to my computer. Errors out. I pull the card out and put it back in the same way, still can't see it. So I say screw this, I'll just do it in the camera but transfer a little bit of the pictures at a time. I put the card in the camera and the camera tells me that the card needs formatting because it's not format. WHAT???????????!!!!!!!!!!!!! I double check it. Yep, the card is empty. Gone. Over 200 pictures from this build thread!!!!!!! Gone. And they are going to be hard to duplicate because they were taken while the work was being done.

So one more time to make myself feel better

I HATE HEWLETT PACKARD

Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, so now that I've said that I can move on. I'll have to see what the real damage is and what I can redo for this build thread. I will apologize if there are parts and pictures not as well documented as they could be. I'll do the best I can to recover from this.

Thanks for listening

Ken