Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Situation room update

You may have noticed that I blogged about migrating files from an XP computer to a Vista computer and wondered, "What's going on over there at White Noise headquarters?" Computer breakage - that's what's going on - and I'm not even talking about the old computer yet. But seriously, we had to buy a new computer for Darlene because her old one had become.... how shall we say..... unreliable. The new system came with Windows Vista [gack!] with a promise of a free upgrade to Windows 7 once it comes out (Yeah!). Vista doesn't perform badly - and it shouldn't on this machine with 4GB of memory, but once we got external things hooked up, that's when happiness left the building.

Let's start with the printer. We have an ancient (read 4 year old) laser printer which means - parallel port connection. Guess what? [said as Goldmember] "Obsolete technology." No problem - I bought a cable adaptor that allows a printer with a parallel port to connect to a PC via USB. Works like a charm. Unfortunately, Vista does not have a driver for this printer model. In fact, even the maker of the printer does not have a Vista driver for this model. But they do suggest to use an alternate model's driver that is built into Vista. That worked. But what is the likelihood of an average user figuring this out - not too good. Moving on.

Scanner. Not supported by Vista. Tried everything - no compatibility with Vista. Do you see a pattern emerging? The lesson to be learned is that when you buy a new computer with a new operating system (by Microsoft), anticipate that some of your existing hardware (and software) may not work with the new system.

On a brighter note, we did find a good deal on a computer, which we bought through Costco online of all places. What I liked about this deal is the same price as places like Best Buy, but with a free additional year's warranty and free shipping. Me likey.

The error message pictured is not real. I made it up.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

oh the vista thing really hacks me off. I've had to purchase a trolling programs that looks for updated drivers for all my connected goodies....sheesh what a pain in the pocket book.
(on another note, my word verification was TENSCARI, I think that's horror night on the Enterprise)