I am a week behind on finishing my expense report for work. My old HP All-In-One printer is hooked up directly to an old PC laptop because HP doesn't feel it has a need to support my model's scanner on Mac.

So I go open the lovely looking HP Director software (sarcasm) on this slow machine and wait, and wait, and wait. I didn't think much of it because it is a 3.5 year old machine "Why should it still be fast?" (sarcasm)

Nothing opens. So I am thinking that I didn't get my double-click in fast enough... Launch again. Nothing. No error, no crash dialog, absolutely nothing. I reboot the machine. Nothing. I plug in the network cable on the off chance it needs a connection. Nothing. Go to their website and try an do a "HP Software Update". Internet Explorer just hangs trying to load the Active X control. In the meantime, the fan is sounding like an afterburner. Crap. I look just for the latest HP All-in-one software download and can't find it anywhere... What do I do? I've already spent 45 minutes on trying to launch the program. Google Search time.

So I know it is a bad sign when I go to Google, I start typing "HP Director" and the second item on the Google Suggestions says "HP Director won't open". I start trolling through the forums. The forum mentions running some kind of Windows Scripting Host file. Nope. No beans.... More trolling. And then I hit pay dirt. People mentioning that if they uninstalled IE7, things started magically working. About 2 weeks ago I updated the PC from IE6 to IE8 thinking MS finally got all the kinks out of it.

In the meantime I am cussing up a storm, my wife comes in and tells me that there is another way to launch the scanning software through opening this other HP software. So yay! I finally launch it and of course it only scans to Tiff files! Tiff files? come on, what is this 1995? Luckily through this other save mechanism I was able to finally get the scan into a .pdf (thanks again to my wife), but it really was a bunch of wasted effort.

So who's fault is my over an hour of wasted time? HP? Microsoft? Both? Somewhere is a bad design. To not even give the user an error on launch is just dumb.

Yes, there are problems on Mac. Yes it is not the perfect OS. But these types of aggravations really just don't happen to me. My Mac Mini is 6 months younger than the PC laptop and it is quiet as the day I turned it on. Has an uptime average probably 3 or 4 times the PC. It doubles as a file server and an iTunes server and even is my wife's current email and browser machine.

Instead of trying to fix the HP software, maybe I should just ditch the printer/scanner all together and go get one that supports both Mac and Windows.