Bagel Belly Blog

Printer woes

Fresh from my success with my sister's wifi-loathing XP install, I was confronted with a printer that refused to print at my parents' house (I swear they save these problems up, to make for an extra special visit home).

The printer itself seemed physically ok - it did all the right things when power-cycled, fed paper, moved the print head when you opened it, and so on. The printer cable seemed secure enough. Windows could see it, but kept telling me it was offline.

I did the uninstall / reinstall driver dance. And lo! the printer started printing, and the people did rejoice. Score 2 for the gardeners.

So two machines randomly forgetting how to use peripherals in two separate installations. Not looking like coincidence any more, looking more like Windows is unstable crap. Anyone care to donate to the "buy the family Mac Minis" fund? ;-)

Seriously - assuming this pattern is being repeated across the country and across the world (I'm damned sure it is) - how many man-days are lost each year to Windows' eccentricities? How many more years can this really go on?

Now that I have the family using Firefox for browsing, and webmail or Thunderbird for email, I just need to get them onto OpenOffice and then I think I'll be safe to switch them over to Linux. Last time I tried them with OO they were screaming within hours for MS Office to return. Hopefully OO has improved enough by now to be a viable replacement.