Wassup Jose Weblog nonsense at its best!

Remove HPZ12 Drivers

I am going to refrain from throwing another SOB! out there, but do want to state that this is another one of those moments. I installed the HP Officejet J5700 Drivers on a notebook, because I had to print several documents.

Easy enough, I downloaded the driver, extracted the files, and ran the setup program. The notebook felt sluggish after the install, what is up now? The installer installed two services, which were not playing nicely with XP (resource hogs).

I cannot have that shit going on, so I uninstalled the HP driver. All installed files should be toast, right? WRONG! The uninstaller removed most of the files, but left the damn services intact. Why are the services still installed?

If I uninstall an application, I expect ALL non-user created files to be removed. No ands, ifs, or buts about it. The uninstaller left tens of files littered across the file system too. Do you want to delete the services, but don't want to sift through hundreds of posts?

Use the sc.exe utility to delete the service subkeys from the registry. If you know your way around the registry, hop to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services and delete the HPZ12 keys and subkeys.

Delete syntax: sc delete [ServiceName]

Here is another pisser for you. The sc.exe utility will delete the registry keys, but not the physical files. You can review the install log file and delete each file manually or do what I did, search for all files created on the driver install date and delete the HP driver crap.

Not quite finished yet, so hold your horses. Fire up the registry cleaner utility and fix the HP driver-related errors (I mention this because you may have other HP software installed on your computer). On the other hand, if it's flagged then fix as needed. Grrr!