A colleague purchased a new HP Pavillion DV6 series laptop a couple of months ago which I setup for him here and left him to install his printer.

On Monday he brought the Laptop and his HP C4280 printer to me and explained that the printer worked fine but the scanner did not

I looked at the installation CD and saw it was for XP/Vista but not Win 7 so I suggested this was the problem, so he left it with me.

I removed the printer driver and just for fun, tried the CD install again but it told me that the “Operating System was not supported”

“ODD! How did he get it to work.”

Anyway, using my computer I went to the HP web site and located the correct driver for Win 7 (32 bit) and downloaded it (209 meg!)

I copied it over to the the laptop ran it, but it just opened a Dos like window for 5 seconds then closed it and for the next 30 seconds the Hard Drive activity light flashed.

I tried various things like ‘RUN AS ADMINISTRATOR’ etc but no go.

I decided to phone the HP support line and eventually I got through to the HP help desk and explained the problem.

All the young lady could suggest was to… “Download it again on the Laptop using Internet explorer.”

Interestingly she claimed that sometimes using another computer, or a browser other than Internet Explorer can affect the download.

“Yeah Right, and I’m the Easter Bunny!” was my thought, but I decided to do as she suggested before asking for the problem to be escalated up the chain.

I downloaded it the file and ran it and to my surprise, it installed perfectly.

I then compared it to the earlier one. The properties were identical right down to the last byte so I located a Freeware Checksum Hashing program and tried it.

Low and behold, the Checksums on the 2 files were quite different even though the size was identical.

I have to confess I was amazed and it is certainly something to keep in mind.

Thinking about it afterward, I realised that because the printer worked, he thought he had installed the CD but in fact, Win 7 had loaded an internal basic driver but of course the scanner was unavailable.