Defaulting

I take my notebook computer back and forth from work to home. Becausem, well, that’s what I’m supposed to be able to do, right? Trouble is, at the office, I print to this keen Xerox printer/copier monster, while at home I print to my little Samsung laser printer.

It so happens that I end up with two different hardware profiles — Docked and Undocked — between office and home. So I should be able to associate a given printer as the default with a given hardware profile.

Nuh-uh. XP don’t play that. Microsoft has never quite figured out how one-to-many solutions — one person to many computers, one computer to many persons, one computer to many locations — work quite right. Way too much of its OS is oriented around one person, one location, one PC. Which probably fits 80% of its target audience, but being in that 20% sucks.

So about six months ago or so, I found this little widget called ProfileLink, from Heptasoft. It lets you associate start-up programs with hardware profiles (“If I start with this profile, go ahead and fire up Outlook”), but, as important, it also remembers what you’ve set as the default printer in each profile, and saves that info to reapply it automatically when that profile is invoked again.

Problem is, it only works about 80% of the time. At least the default printer part.

I’ve been trying to get an update (there is one, according to all the shareware products) downloaded almost since then. Problem (a more fundamental problem) is, Heptasoft seems gone with the wind. First the page was “down for redesign.” Now it’s password protected.

No updates, or anything else, available.

So I guess the question is, does anyone else know of a clever widget to do this — associate a given default printer to a hardware profile — in XP? I can’t believe I’m the only person to have ever struggled with this, but it seems like everyone who has, ended up with ProfileLink.

*sigh*