Despite all this talk to the contrary, I ended up spending this whole afternoon fixing an English professor's home machine. The configuration was a mess. Somebody had, at one distant point in the past, configured her home DSL with an Apple AirPort Express, including serving her HP all-in-one fax/print/scan gateway via the AirPort. Then, at some other point, things went wrong. A succession of people tried to fix things, including SBC/Yahoo DSL's tech support people. By the time I got to it, the configuration was a shambles. SBC's tech support, in particular, had directed her to rip out the AirPort and had her connected directly to the DSL modem and running some awful SBC/Yahoo PPPoE "dialup" software. Uggh.

I stripped out all of that old junk, as well as Comet Cursor and Starwave. How did those get on there? Zap!

Anyway, the "AirPort Setup Assistant" that was already on her machine wasn't working properly. Thankfully, a neighbor was participating in the Linksys Public Wireless Network, so I was able to download the latest from Apple and reconfigure the AirPort from scratch. Now, that part at least is working as it was intended to work.

The printer is another matter. I've fought with these all-in-one gizmos before, and it's never pretty. I figured Apple's Bonjour might be the easiest way to go, since it certainly should have been able to find the printer hanging off the AirPort. Turns out, the user account I'm using doesn't have sufficient privileges to install a printer! Aarrrgggh. (Or, that's what happened when I tried to point the printer wizard at the specific drivers for the printer.) I decided to back off the AirPort, for the printer, and connect it directly to the computer. This worked exactly how it was supposed to work.

Fine, back to Bonjour and the network printer. Of course, of the zillions of OfficeJet products that appear in the printer selection wizard, none of them are the printer I just installed. I have some reason to suspect that the printer is a DeskJet 9xx, so I figured why not try those? I went for the DeskJet 920c. Sure 'nuff, printing seems to work! So far as I can tell, she doesn't care about the "multifunction" bits, so I think I'll call it done for a day.

How on earth are non-technical people supposed to be able to make this sort of thing "just work"? Even if you go with an all-Apple solution, does this stuff get any easier? Wow. I'm just trying to make sure I leave enough notes, all in one place, that whoever comes after me doesn't feel the need to rip everything out and start all over again.