Home networks are a wonderful technology, enabling you to share internet connection and devices such as printers and storage among all computers in your home. They can also be complicated and a bit mysterious at times. Trying to figure out how to add a new device or troubleshoot why an existing device cannot communicate on the network is often frustrating and can even be intimidating.

For the modern digital household, home networks have become similar to indoor plumbing. They bring important resources into our homes and we have come to depend on them, taking them for granted until something breaks, and then either working on them ourselves or calling an expert. There are key differences too. You can’t see what is “flowing” through your home network easily. Also, I don’t worry about “bad guys” trying to sneak into my house through my water pipes!

At HP, we have been making networked inkjet printers since 2003. Since then we have learned a lot about what can go wrong and how frustrating it can be to figure out and resolve these issues. We have learned by studying the reasons people call customer support, by reading customer postings around the internet, and by using the products ourselves in our own homes. We used what we learned to make our printers smarter and better able to deal with network issues, but there are still network configuration issues (which the printer has no control over) that interfere with printer communication. So while our printers are continuing to get smarter at reacting to network issues, there are still things that can go wrong. This blog is our chance to communicate what we have learned about these problems and ways to resolve them. A lot of material is on the hp.com site as well as in product manuals already, but it isn’t always easy to find the right set of instructions that magically fixes the specific problem you have. So we’ll also point you to the right places to find things too.

Comments are welcome from anyone, whether you are a network guru or completely naive about home networking. This is one place where there is no such thing as a dumb question.

One thing that we have learned is that many people who buy our products have a friend or relative they rely on to help them when something goes wrong. These “smart friends” are tech savvy, like discussing technology, like helping people, and like participating in blogs. I hope many of those people participate in this blog too. I think we will all have a lot to talk about and to learn from each other.