PC Death
 

The HP PC that my wife uses totally died today. I haven't looked at it but assume it cannot be recovered.

I haven't set up anything other than a mac recently.

Remind me -- if I can recover the machine but lose all her settings and data, how hard will it be for me to reinstall everything as well as hook up the printer, cable modem, scanner and other peripherals?

When I hooked up my son's mac mini, all I did was plug the printer in and turned it on. Spoiled.

PC Death
 

Which OS? XP is easy, earlier versions, somewhat more difficult.

PC Death
 

XP but I don't know what version of it originally came on the PC. I do not have the windows disks and I am sure it was built before service pack 1 or 2.

PC Death
 

It should still have a recovery point that may or may not be far enough back to keep your settings. Most of the peripherals should be plug and play if they are of similar vintage. Older or odd pieces might cause you a problem. If you had it connected to the web, SP1 and 2 would have been available and XP bugs you regularly if you have auto update turned off.

I haven't actually dealt with the reboot anytime recently (and only once, at that), so I'm no expert on the steps, but if you can access the HD, you should be able to bring it almost all back.

PC Death
 

All blown out. We have internet and 1 inkjet printer. Scanner is too old and cannot find the firmware or disks.

PC Death
 

So, plug it into the Mac. It will probably work. Buy a new scanner for the PC.

PC Death
 

Nah, I tried that and it's one of the few that was PC only.

I am going to get a laser all-in-one for the PC (for which my wife did most of the recovery work).

I would have much preferred plugiing in a mac mini so all the networking and sharing was plug and play but whatever.

Also the mac backup program is so wonderfully transparent.

PC Death
 

A thought on this: Get a networkable all-in-one. (I have a Brother, which was about $300 a year ago). The model I have allows you to scan/print/fax over your network, and it works in a mixed PC/Mac environment. There's some feature that doesn't work on a mac, but it's minor (something like faxing to email from the printer).

PC Death
 

You must have the Brother 7820N. I looked at the 7820.

This doesn't have internal wireless, does it?

The ad seems to suggest you plug it into the airport using an ethernet cable. My PC is plugged into the airport via an ethernet cable so what do I do, get an ethernet splitter? Haven't used one. I am worried that the cable company, however, could decide to bill us for two computers if it saw two MAC addresses.

PC Death
 

That's the model (pretty sure). I believe there's a wireless option, but not sure.

Here's what you need to do--get a cheap switch like this (which is an internet splitter) and plug that into the airport. Then plug the PC and the printer into that.

If you have the airport connected directly to your cable modem, you're already set. The cable co will see the MAC address from the airport. You could add dozens of computers and it wouldn't know. The airport is acting as a router already, and distributing internal IP addresses to both your mac and PC (they probably all begin with something like 192.168.xxx.xxx or 10.xxx.xxx.xxx. Meanwhile, the IP address your Airport has is assigned by the cable co and will begin with some other number, not 192 or 10 (you should be able to confirm in the airport admin utitility or in your networking preferences)

PC Death
 

Awesome. Then I can plub my other printer too -- HP 2600n -- and have two printers and 1 pc on the ethernet and slap something else in the USB.

Thanks.

ETA:

Only problem is that reviews have called it a power hog. Might be a deal-breaker on the overloaded circuits in my house.

I used to have a Samsung printer that you couldn't use when you had the air conditioning on.

PC Death
 

Doing research on these printers for the last few days has led me to the sad conclusion that the Internet has rendered Consumer Reports largely irrelevant.

PC Death
 

For computer stuff, yes. They take too long to review. The repair and service reports are useful though.

Bullish on AAPL
 

Time spent adding my network printer to my apple macbook:

< 1 min

Time spent adding my network printer to my wife's PC

45 minutes spent trying to find, being unable to find, deleting, reinstalling etc.

Bullish on AAPL
 

Add to that 1 hour spent ridding that POS of xpl.wmf spyware and shit, which neither Norton nor Windows was able to fix.