Since my old printer died a few months ago I’ve been looking for a suitable replacement. I ummed and ahhed for quite some time trying to work out what I wanted from a new device – eventually I decided that I wanted

• a colour printer
• integrated scanner
• ideally wireless printing & scanning
• cheap (<£100)

I’d almost given up on finding all these features in one device for the right price, then on Friday I spotted the HP Photosmart C4585 for £75 on the pc world website & decided it looked just the job.

Set up

Setting up the printer was surprisingly easy. Once the power was connected the printer displays easy to follow instructions for installing the ink cartridges on it’s screen.

Next I popped the set up DVD into my MacBook & followed the instructions. I was half expecting to experience pain trying to set the printer up with the Mac, but actually it was a doddle there’s a wizard that guides you through the whole process. Eventually it asks you to connect the the printer using the supplied USB cable; it asks you if you want to connect to a wireless network, if you answer yes the set up program displays the name of the network your computer is attached to and prompts to enter the network key and er, that’s it. Easy.

Note: When adding the printer under Print & Fax on your Mac OS X be sure to choose “HP Jetdirect – Socket” from the protocol drop down or you’ll get network device not ready errors when you try to print.

I thought it was a nice touch that HP provide a Mac OS desktop widget that shows you the printers ink levels.

Now that the printer was on the network it was very simple to set it up on the wife’s Windows XP rig. Again there’s a wizard to walk you through the set up, this time I told the software I wanted to install a network printer – it did a quick scan & found the printer. very, very easy.

Printing

If you buy a printer it’s a good idea to buy paper unless you’re sure you already have some. I wasn’t able to test the printing straight away. But when I did get to the shop and printed a documents I was very pleased with the text printing. I’ve also tried printing one photo (on photo paper) so far, I have to say I’m extremely impressed with the quality.

Scanning

Before setting up the printer / scanner I wasn’t entirely sure if the scanning function was goting to be available over Wifi, I was extremely pleased to find that it does. No more plugging in USB leads for me! The scan results seem very good, so far I’ve used it to upload embarrassing photos of my Sisters to Facebook.

Conclusion

I’ve only had this bit of kit for a couple of days, but at the moment I’d be more than happy to recommend it to anyone based on my limited experience.

As soon as I popped the installation CD into the PC I hit a problem, it didn’t matter what option I hit the cd opened the help box. After much swearing and head scratching I discovered that the software on the Orange installCD is not compatible with the Adobe Flash 9 player. This is frankly ridiculous, I can’t believe that Orange have sent out a disk without testing it against the latest version of the player. I think that’s unacceptable.

Anyway, once I’d un-installed flash 9 installation is a doddle, the wired connection is (if I remember correctly) automatic. For the wireless installation, you first install a client on the computer you want to connect wirelessly, then put the Live Box into “pairing mode” by pressing a button on the router and then search for the wireless network and enter the WEP key printed on the bottom of the Live Box. All pretty straight forward.

The Live Box has a USB port for connecting to a PC, I used one of the two Ethernet ports. It also has a phone socket which allows you to connect a telephone and use the Live box to make VOIP calls,this is something the in-laws may want to do later.

Overall, I was quite impressed with the Live box; I like the way that all the admin & set up stuff is handled automatically, for most home users that’s be great. I’m not sure if it’s possible to do more advanced stuff like reserve IP addresses or set your own SSID, I’ll have a look into that next time I’m at the inlaws. I think it could also use a couple more Ethernet ports, we used the two available up straight away by connecting to the desktop PC and a netgear printserver.

As part of my current drive to reduce the clutter caused by the computer equipment in the house I decided to look into getting a print server so that the printer could be tucked somewhere out of the way (like under the coffee table behind the sofa) without us having to scrabble about for a USB lead when we decide to print. So, last week I ordered a reconditioned Netgear PS121 from digidave.

The unit is tiny! It has three ports, one for power one USB and one Ethernet. There are two status lights at the top of the unit. The unit came with a power supply and USB lead but no Ethernet cable which I thought was odd as people are more likely to have a USB lead for their printer than they are to have a network cable laying around.
Set up is a doddle; plug the USB lead from the printer into the print server then plug it in to the mains and connect it to your router with an Ethernet cable then toddle off and find a PC.

On the PC you install two bits of software; the first lets you see your print server on the network, the second shows you the printer connected to your server and gets you to select the right driver from a list. It really is very easy indeed. I was up and running printing over the wireless network on the first network in under ten minutes. It took me a bit longer on the second machine, I think this was because my VPN client was interfering with set up, but I soon sorted that out.

I think this is going to prove to be another extremely useful bit of kit.

Photoshop Album has a number of features but the main thing I use it for is keeping my photos organised. You create your own “Tags” within PSA these are a short description that you apply to your photos. The tags can be anything you want, but PSA ships with a number of categories that the suggest you use for your tags, People and Places for example.

You can add multiple tags to your pictures and then search through your photos based on the tags you have added; so if I want to find all the photos of Laura and Isla together I click on the Laura and Isla tags and PSA displays all the photos of the two women in my life.

Having spent many hours adding tags to Photoshop Album I was keen not to loose that information when I moved my photos to my new network hard drive, so I set about finding a way to keep it, and better yet share the tags across the network.

First I copied the photos from my computer’s hard drive onto the network hard drive. I copied everything under “My Pictures” to “E:/Photos”.
The next thing to do was to find where PSA was storing the Catalogue, to do this open PSA and click on “help > system info” You should see this screen:

Note the location and name of the catalog. I copied the Catalog file and renamed the copy My Catalog.mdb. This allows you to edit the file with Microsoft Access.

Open the database and look for the table called “ImageTable”; do a find and replace on “fImageOriginalFilePath” and “fMediaFullPath” replace the files original location with the new location, e.g. Find “C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\My Documents\My Pictures” replace with “E:\photos”.

Close the database and change the extension back to .psa then copy your altered catalog onto the network drive. I copied mine to “E:\Adobe\PSA\”.

Next we need to change where PSA looks for it’s catalog. Click on the start button then “run” in the text box type “regedit” and press enter. The registry editor will open. Press F3 in the “Find what:” box type the old path to your catalog (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop Album\Catalogs\).
Under “Look At” uncheck “keys” then click on find. The registry editor will find two or three entries with this value; when you find one double click on it and change the value to the new location of your .psa file. Press F3 to search again until all entries in the registry are replaced.

If you are planning to install PSA on more than one machine you will need to repeat the registry editing on each machine once you have installed PSA.

You can now open Photoshop Album, it will now be looking at the shared area on your network.

Note: This method does have limitations you will *probably* only be able to access PSA from one machine at a time.

The poor old desktop is currently squatting on the coffee table in the lounge, with it’s 19′ CRT monitor and incredibly noisy fan it’s living on borrowed time.Last weekend we went out and bought a new laptop for Laura to use so we can retire the it.

I wanted to find an easy way for us to share our photos and music on the network so after considering various options I finally decided to order a 400GB Freecom External SL Network Hard Drive. There where two main reasons for this: First, at 400GB I reckon it’ll take me quite a while to fill, and secondly you can use it as a network drive or a USB drive which I hoping means I’ll be able to use it for video editing when directly attached to my laptop.
Yesterday My new drive arrived. More or less as soon as I got home I plugged it in to the network and switched it on.

The first thing I noticed is it’s pretty noisy. Admittedly not as noisy as the desktop, but too noisy to have running in the lounge all the time, so I’ll have to find a better home for it.

Setting up the PCs so that they could access the drive was fairly straightforward. Fist you install the drive administration software and reboot the PC. Once the PC restarts you open up the “Classic SL Network Drive Administrator Tool” and add the details of your drive. This is really straight forward; First off you can choose a name for your drive, then you enter the 20-digit Classic SL Network Drive ID located on the bottom of your Classic SL Network Drive and finally the “Write Key” assuming you want to be able to write to the network drive. The PC detects the drive and installs the required drivers and that’s it. The freecom drive appears as a local drive in “My Computer” in my case it’s the “E:/” drive.

So Far I’m impressed. pulling photos across the wireless network is a bit slower than accessing them from the local disc, and I suppose that could become irritating, but there’s always the option of plugging the laptop into the router with an Ethernet cable, or using USB to attach the drive directly to the PC.