HP officejet 5110 won't detect HEEEELP!?!?!

[QueBert]

My friend bought a HP 5110 All-In-One. I installed the CD, plugged in the usb, nothing... rebooted checked the BIOS. there was no USB options. I brought my box over, which I know the USB works, tried. same thing, nothing happened, it didn't detected it no matter what I tried.

I called HP tech support, got a pretty good, smart tech. he went over everything it could possibly be, even had me change the USB type in the control panel, don't remember which, but it was under "Intel" nada. He told me "return it and get another" that was my idea.

today we go back to Costco and got another. My hopes were high it was just the first one was defective. GUess what, SAME THING!

now I disabled the virus scanner on his before installing the drivers. I followed HP's install poster to the T (just to be safe) nothing at all.
brought my box back over, it won't even detect it!

this is making is crazy. I don't have his exact specs but this is what I know.

Pent 2 733, intel MB (don't know the model or maker sorry)
when it's posting it it says "USB device(s): mouse" and that's it. I'm not sure if it's supposed to show a printer there, but if it is, it doesn't. I even had him upgrade from win98se to XP.

my setup. XP 2000+, MSI Nforce2 MB, the XP install is clean from about 4 days ago.

I can't get either to auto detect it when I plug it in. I think the odd's of getting 2 bad units in a row is pretty low, I'm sure it's possible but I don't know.

Oh yeah, I tried 2 different USB cables, and all the USB ports, nada. On his I know the USB works because we got a USB mouse today and had no issues with windows autodetecting it.

He would get a different unit, but Costco out here only has HP it seems. ANYONE have any ideas? I'm going to call HP tomorrow and see if there is any other things to try. Having 2 totally different PC's it making me nutts, I have absolutly no ideas

thanks, if anyone responses

 

[Agamar]

Sounds like you are having some major problems with HP. Try getting one of their printers that support both USB and Parallel. I know they made these models last year.

 

[Chucko]

This sometimes happens with installing Hp printers over usb connection. I would goto device manager, and you should have a officejet 5100 series device in the other devices category (The category with the ? mark), and right click the officejet and select update driver. Windows should then go out and install the driver that it has, but doesn't know it has. (The driver you installed of the cd) I sometimes get this problem and it works for me.