Yes, all of the 5 or 6 versions of the Officejet 4500 are fully supported by hplip. You may like to install hplip-gui as well to get the system-tray...
A quick and good way to see how many kernels you have installed and showing in the grub menu, even if you don't normally see that menu is to run grep...
Backup your /home folder, including all hidden folders and files, to an external disk of some sort, reinstall and then restore the parts of the /home...
Forget about glxgears; the framerate it shows is the same as your refresh rate, useless as a benchmark; not that it was ever much good for that!
See...