Today's big accomplishment

Well, despite the utter lack of help from HP/Compaq's tech support regime, I managed to solve the technical problem with printing from my new laptop (see last entry).

The problem was: when trying to download a driver from HP's support website, the download didn't work. Not just today, but every day for the last ten days. You hit the "download" button and the only thing that happens is a status bar inches forward, and then after a minute the whole thing times out and you go to a HTTP error page that says "This page not available."

But I noticed that the URL given in the HTTP error page was preserved -- it was an HTTP referral to an HP FTP site. So I used my FTP client (CuteFTP) to FTP into their website where, after a lot of searching, I found the .exe file the original download was trying to grab. I FTP'd it to my laptop and unzipped it.

I still had to install it, but I eventually figured out how to do that, as well as how to create a "standard TCP/IP port" for the laptop to use to connect to the printer over the wireless network here at home.

Finally, after 2 hours and 40 minutes (including the hour wasted calling HP's tech support) -- not to mention the 10 days I wasted trying to download the file from their website -- I was able to print.