HP Photosmart 2610 and XP printing as a restricted rights user

Yes indeed, no longer do you need to run Win­dows as an Admin­is­tra­tor, free to install spy­ware and other para­pher­na­lia so often asso­ci­ated with the awfully dan­ger­ous world that is the Inter­net. Or something.

Rea­sons for not want­ing to run as Admin­is­tra­tor vary (for me, it’s mostly a back­ground in Unix that has edu­cated me thus), but no longer, thanks to a help­ful reader, do we have to suf­fer under the regime of HP’s dri­vers and auto­mated instal­la­tion that ren­ders print­ing as any user but admin­is­tra­tor impos­si­ble. (Pre­vi­ously elu­ci­dated here).

Well, some­one had to solve the prob­lem even­tu­ally (and, know­ing the way things go around here, it wasn’t going to be HP’s noto­ri­ously pathetic driver/software team), and that some­one was Dan­lio in the com­ments of my review! Wooo!

A slightly edited ver­sion follows:

Just open the printer set­tings. (Right click on “HP Pho­to­s­mart 2610 series, then click “Prop­er­ties”).
Click on the “Ports” tab.
“Add port”
Select “HP Stan­dard TCP/IP port”.
Click “Next”.
Enter the cor­rect IP address of your HP 2610 printer. The other field will auto­mat­i­cally fill — this does not need to be changed. Click “Next”.

There you go!

Now you can print logged in with any user account (not only administrators).

Woo! I don’t think a Win­dows test page has ever looked so beautiful ;-)