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  Vista Dropped Your Printer? Blame Microsoft
Time: 10:28 EST/15:28 GMT | News Source: PC Magazine | Posted By: Kenneth van Surksum

M.David Stone: Lately I've gotten lots of e-mail complaining about the lack of printer and scanner driver compatibility for Vista in older, and in many cases discontinued, models. Every complaint blames the manufacturer for not providing a Vista driver at all, or providing one that lacks support for some of the printer's or scanner's functions. Most go further, into heated—if not outright flame—territory, accusing the manufacturer in question of trying to rip off the poor consumer. A good number include some variation on the phrase "I will never again buy a (printer or scanner) from (company name)." At least as many letters suggest that PC Magazine ought to write about this issue. Well, sure—here goes, though I know a lot of people will disagree with my conclusions.

First, I'd argue that all of these e-mails lay the blame at the wrong doorstep. Microsoft is the one that chose not to provide backward compatibility in Vista. Instead, it dropped the problem into everyone else's lap. If you're going to be angry, you should at least aim your anger in the right direction.

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#1 By 92283 (142.32.208.232) at 2/25/2008 11:00:29 AM
Canon i950 - Introduced Feb 2003.

Driver worked in RC1 of Vista.

I'll keep buying Canon printers.

#2 By 2960 (72.196.195.185) at 2/25/2008 11:23:37 AM
Same here, plus a Pixma 8500 and Canon scanner. No issues getting Vista drivers. Canon has always been good about this.

Visioneer is bloody horrible.

I'm really tired of this "once we don't sell it new any more, it's a dead product" BS that manufacturers are starting to use when it comes to drivers. Hardware and it's useability last a LOT LONGER than it's sales cycle.

You either take care of your customers, or you don't. If you don't, then when it does come time to replace it, we go somewhere else.

By doing this you aren't forcing us to buy new one's from you, thus increasing your revenues. You are pissing us off and making us go buy from someone else.

Software companies are guilty of this too. I've ceased using several products for this very reason. Instead of a patch to make it work with vista, some are forcing you to by new, expensive versions. Not gonna happen. There are always alternatives, and if I have to buy all over again I may as well give the money to someone else.

AMD lost me for this very reason last year when I upraded. I wanted to upgrade the 4800x2 in my machine to one of the newer 6000+x2's, but since AMD stupidly changed away from socket 939 for no good apparant reason, it meant a whole new motherboard. Fine. So be it. I did purchase the new processor and motherboard. From Intel...

TL

#3 By 75046 (201.52.224.134) at 2/25/2008 11:42:19 AM
My Hp PSC 1510 multifunction works since day 1 in Vista with scanner too and no need to install anything from cds. In XP I need install the software pack...

#4 By 60455 (68.186.182.236) at 2/25/2008 12:23:42 PM
Blame Microsoft... What?

The industry pressed Microsoft to modify how it supported developers and device manufacturers specifically as it regards printing and support for print device drivers.

Microsoft responded big time and addressed every tiny nit-picking request the industry had and print / printer support in Windows Vista is better than it has ever been and far easier on developers and device manufacturers than it has been for any previous version of Windows.

For the Microsoft Windows operating system, Microsoft-provided spooler and driver components are designed to be replaceable, so hardware vendors can easily add support for new hardware. Support for a new printer usually requires only the creation of new data files for use with one of the Microsoft-supplied printer drivers.

I recommend that Mr. Stone do a little reading here,
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/print/default.mspx

Once again... all others are given a pass as another "expert" appears to trade the truth for hits and ad dollars. The Vista and Microsoft bashing for dollars bull is getting out of hand.

#5 By 1896 (216.189.183.117) at 2/25/2008 2:13:02 PM
IMO there is enough to blame everybody, although for different reasons that the ones mentioned in the article:
I blame HP because they never released the software package for the HP 2840 (printer, copier, fax and scanner) for Vista 64 and not only the drivers to print on it.
I blame MS because they gave to the same printer the "Vista ready" ,or "certified for Vista" as they call it now, sticker; as far as I am concern Vista comes both in 32 and 64 therefore to be labeled as "Vista ready" there should be support for both editions of the OS. As long as they are shipping OSes in both editions they should overhaul the labeling system and specify: "certified for Vista 32 " and "certified for Vista 64".















#6 By 8556 (12.208.163.138) at 2/25/2008 2:36:04 PM
There may be lawsuits aplenty for all items that were labeled "Vista Ready" without stating that "ready" doesn't mean "ready for all versions of Vista".
http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/23/technology/vista_classaction.ap/index.htm?cnn=yes

#7 By 102140 (131.107.0.105) at 2/25/2008 2:37:07 PM
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=au&prodNameId=445195&prodTypeId=18972&prodSeriesId=445194&swLang=8&taskId=135&swEnvOID=2100

HP's Vista 64-bit driver for the 2800.
Microsoft requires 64-bit drivers for the Vista logo.

#8 By 17996 (131.107.0.105) at 2/25/2008 4:48:26 PM
Funny, my Canon BJC-4300 from 1997 still works perfectly under Vista using Vista's built-in driver for it.

I think the big problem is that people try to install the bloatware that printer manufacturers include on CD, thinking that it's all required in order to use the printer. Most printers should just work out-of-the-box. (I think I remember seeing somewhere a list of all the printers that Vista supports out-of-the-box -- it numbered somewhere in the thousands.)

Scanners on the other hand are a different story; my dad's 10-year-old scanner, which required trickery to even get to work in XP, flat out won't work with Vista. But when the scanner manufacturer's website looks like it was written in 1995, how can you trust them to know how to write good drivers?

#9 By 13997 (71.94.92.91) at 2/25/2008 6:56:02 PM
This article is really crap, with little understanding of the technology or the reasoning behind it.

Most of the 'incompatible' devices are ones that implemented 'custom' interfaces instead of using the standard Windows print subsystem. HP has a horrible habit of 'reinventing' the printer driver, not only for every model, but by BYPASSING all the core systems in Windows and implementing the features for themselves - resulting in incompatibility and buggy operation.

For example Windows has event handles for scanners, cameras, memory cards, etc that just work and trigger the OS to prompt for action or send the content to a program of choice. HP on many models rips out the 'event' system for the HP products, and reimplements the 'autoplay/import' system themselves. Which not only makes their products buggy, but also will kill other autoplay events from other devices, and with future versions of Windows, stop working all together. AKA Vista...

If you follow companies that stick to the Windows systems and use the proper built in subsystems, the products will work from version to version to version. As some have noted Canon, and Epson has a great track record of using the Windows designed device APIs and systems, and they have very few products that fail to work when new systems are introduced.

The other thing missed is that Vista has a 'new' printing subsystem, and provides a compatibility and conversion layer for GDI/XPS devices back and forth. And if a company like HP is using their own 'subsystem' to print, there is NO way Vista can provide the compatibility translation to an unknown printing subsystem by a 3rd party. (Lexmark and other companies are also bad about doing things their own way, so it isn't just a HP thing.)

So by creating a new XAML/XML based printing technology in Vista that is beyond any other printing standard (PDF/Postscript/ETC) technology moves forward, but products that chose to go down their own road break. This is not Microsoft's fault.

There are some changes in the WIA system of Vista that Microsoft did NOT provide a compatibility layer for. (It is one of the few new technologies, they didn't, and is understandible when they already have a dual audio subsystems, dual video subsystems, dual networking subsystems, etc that support the new Vista model and the old XP and previous models as well.

So skipping a Dual WIA compatibility layer is not a major issue, and in fact the driver rewrite for these devices are 'minor' changes, but have to come from the MFR. The biggest problem in this area is 64bit support, as most companies didn't support XP 64bit, so they are only updating the 32bit versions of their drivers and not recompiling for 64bit. (Scanners take the biggest hit here.)

So ya, we can point the finger at MS, but this happens when technology advances, and the fact that Vista 'looks' like it isn't much different than XP is a testament to the quality of compability MS did, as most subsystems are new.

Also people like to 'bitch' about Vista, but in reality Leopard OS X had a lot of devices stop working as well, but you don't see big articles about people blaming anyone, let alone Apple. (Look at Leopard and the fact it requires newer video cards than Vista does, leaving old cards unusable, instead of turning off Glass like Vista does.) This is not a dig at Apple, this is just technology advancing and even Apple has to move forward too.

#10 By 20505 (216.102.144.11) at 2/25/2008 7:19:57 PM
Simple solution to this "problem"... um, stick with XP. It's really easy folks. Upgrade for new hardware but don't expect the old stuff to work.

I actually believe MS is better about this than any other vendor (think Apple).

#11 By 82766 (202.154.80.82) at 2/25/2008 7:47:33 PM
My biggest problem with this article, is that I cannot comment on the web page itself!! So we're unable to tell this guy how stupid and wrong the article is!! grrrr!

#12 By 2138 (81.183.97.19) at 2/25/2008 11:15:19 PM
this is what happened when we bought a HP Printer that was suppose to be XP ready, well it stated it everywhere on thier packaging but when we got home and installed the printer, XP stated driver not supported for XP.


#13 By 81201 (79.32.55.245) at 2/26/2008 1:17:08 AM
My very old Canon BJC-2100 (bought before 2001) still works with built-in Vista drivers!

This post was edited by suy on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 at 01:24.

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