My love/hate relationship with hp

Ok.  So I have a few pieces of hp technology in my house. A couple vista computers, keyboards, an all in one printer and a monitor.  And generally I gotta say that they are all mostly great.

But here are a couple beefs:

The all in one printer driver software and utilities that get installed for my All in One Photosmart 4280 (the only really good thing I can say about this printer is that it was cheap) are absolute garbage:

1. First it had numerous conflicts with my tablet drivers – to which I was able to find many other users complaining about on the web to no avail.  Everyone was just advised by hp to turn off all their tablet drivers if they wanted to print.  Greaaaaat.
2. Every time I login to my machine I get an annoying dialog box announcing that my printer is ready for use.  Honestly.  I expect it to be ready for use, if it’s plugged in and on.   Isn’t that normal functioning?  This is so ignorant it blows my mind.  There is no setting for me to dismiss this dialog.  So every time you resume from standby or login – there you go “Your printer is ready for use”.  Holy crap I love that.  How useless and angering.
3. Then – try to go in an remove “Photosmart all in one series software version 8.0” (because I now apparently have version 9.0 listed in my installed programs) and NOW it says if I do this it will uninstall my printer too.  It’s too stupid to know that I have 9.0 installed.  Brilliant.  Thanks for being soooo helpful and turfing my printer device, so I will have to reinstall it shortly.
4. Oh yeah, and try to uninstall hp’s most excellent ecomm hp’s “supplies buying” tool because you will never buy your ink cartridges through this online utility and it tells you not to do this unless, you guessed it, you want your printer uninstalled.  Isn’t this the kind of monopoly crap Microsoft got in trouble for. 

And my other beef is with my PCm7470n Pavilion PC:

• There is a fan in the case that variably runs and sounds like an outboard motor on a fishing boat whenever I do anything to heat up the processor – like watch movies or play games.  So the thing hums and vibrates and whirrs like a total and utter gong show when I try to do anything that warms it up.  Awesome.  So much for trying to watch movies in your TV room with this thing as a media center PC.  So at some point I guess I will have to replace this fan with something more reasonable.

Go hp!