At work I recently had a laptop upgrade to a HP EliteBook 850 G3. This also meant moving to Windows 10 after many years of using Windows 7. The transition has been been mostly positive, but one thing that bugged me for quite a while is that every time I inserted or removed my earphones, about two seconds later I’d get an audible alert and on-screen notification like …

“You just unplugged a device from the audio jack.
Bang & Olufsen.”

I don’t need to be told that a device was unplugged, because I was the one who unplugged it! Age may be wearying me, but my memory retention is still definitely longer than two seconds.

I was sure that there must be a way of turning of these sound device notifications, but couldn’t find anything in the sound settings. Eventually I discovered that it is controlled by the Windows 10 “Notifications & actions” app.

In the “Get notifications from these senders” section, turn off notifications for “Bang & Olufsen”. I don’t know why there are two entries – I just turned them both off.

Now I can plug and unplug as much as I want without Mr Bang or Mr Olufsen trying to impute that I have a brain the size of a goldfish.

I bought a HP2101nw wireless USB print server for a bargain price from an eBay seller, and I had trouble getting it working on my Windows 7 64 bit laptop.When installing the software to configure the print server, there was an error about the driver not installing correctly, and the configuration software wouldn’t recognise the print server and allow it to be configured.

When I checked the system requirements I found that the HP support page only listed 32 bit drivers for Windows XP or Windows Vista. For a while I rued not checking the system requirements more carefully before purchasing, and thought I’d done my dough.

But with a little more perseverance I found that a 32 bit Windows operating system was required only for the initial configuration of the device (to set the WiFi network and password) and after that I was able to get connections to the print server working from other Windows based PC’s.  The steps that worked for me were:

1. Using a Windows 7 32 bit laptop, I installed and ran the configuration software from the supplied CD, and configured the printer server with the WiFi network and password.
2. I then downloaded the Windows 7 32 bit driver as referenced in a discussion on the HP support forum.
3. I was then able to install this driver on the following machines and get them connecting to the wireless print server.
   1. Windows 7 64 bit
   2. Windows 7 32 bit
   3. Windows 10 32 bit

Update

A few months after writing this blog post, the print server just stopped working, and nothing I tried would resurrect it. The purchase turned out to be a dud after all.