Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Further adventures in Apple Land...

So my last post (before leaving for a week vacation at the Lair of the Bear family camp) detailed the initial set up of a Mac Mini for mom. Now we get to the nitty gritty of getting peripherals to work. The bad news is that the Apple OS doesn't come out and tell you that it doesn't have correct drivers for a printer, rather it lets you try everything under the sun to get it to work right and then call tech support to find that neither Apple nor the manufacturer (Canon) have compatible drivers. I mistakenly thought that practically all printers now come with drivers for both OS's, and I was So Wrong. So I then load the nice new HP 1610 printer software on the computer, and proceed to watch the printer shred paper, jam, and generally have a very slow (4 minutes to print a single page of text) hissy fit. I call HP (Apple doesn't support third party printers regardless of whether you bought them from their store) and mention to them that the software on the Mac disk said it was for a Laserjet 3300. HP then said they had had several reports of mislabled discs going out with this printer - and that I would have to download the 93.5 meg file from their site and then uninstall and reinstall. Of course the uninstall didn't work as the files were corrupted, so back to HP tech support again for help in manually uninstalling the incorrect software. However, at the end of the day (and about 6 hours of my time) the new printer is working fine and mom is happy.

And that is what it is all about.

Then she answered the Earthlink phishing email, giving them address, ATM number and password, etc., etc...and sends me an email proudly detailing this achievement.

Sigh.

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