Trouble Installing HP Officejet 6500 on a MacBook Running OS 10.4.11

Question

I'm trying to help a friend install the new HP all in one Officejet 6500 she bought.
We've followed the directions in the start up guide--plugged the USB cable from the printer into the laptop, put the HP install disk in, double clicked on the install icon.
The installer gets through the first few steps--asks us to agree to the EULA, pops up a box with the printer and we select the printer to install, takes us to the easy or custom install page.
No matter whether we select easy or custom, when we click on the install button, nothing happens. No little "I'm thinking" color wheel. No install bar. Nothing.
Any help on what we need to do would be great.

Answer 1

Depending on the age of the printer, drivers for it could have been pre-installed
in the OS X already. For my all-in-one HP Officejet (5610xi) instead of trusting
the older drivers and included software in the box (last year) I went to HP's
support pages and found a rather large download of newer drivers. That worked.
{Though I do not recall now, if the printer had to be turned on (or off) before
installing the drivers and attached to the computer, some of these kinds of
steps are important to follow exactly as per the instructions. I have more
than one brand of printer, so by memory alone, I will not cite an example.}
So, the drivers in the box may not be the best available; so perhaps that is a
part of the issue. Another one may be in not following their setup instructions
exactly and to the letter for Mac OS X. The Quick Setup paper in the HP packet
usually is enough for the Mac; unless they omitted that from your package.
A few weeks ago, I performed a fully new installation of everything to a zeroed
hard drive; including re-install of the large file of HP drivers I downloaded from
their support site. Rather easier to navigate than discuss, the Mac OSX ones
are not hard to find for most available and some older all-in-one units online.
You may have to find and remove just those items installed by the original
HP CD included with the Officejet 6500; or maybe not. I tried to not install
their older drivers based on the date of the files in their disk. In a few cases
using existing old drivers may be almost inescapable; but in newer OS X
versions, those old ones are problematic. Do Not get the latest Snow Leopard
drivers, they are listed and linked from Apple Support> Downloads. Instead,
go to HP Support and get the correct ones for the unit you have there, and be
sure to check that the ones you get are Not for OS X 10.6.
HP Support & Drivers:
http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/support.html
Good luck & happy computing!