Friday, March 16, 2012

Printers and scanners

I wrote last about my new laptop, and now, 2 months later, I think I have most data transferred and I can figure out where most of the stuff ended up. The problem that took a while to deal with is the old 3-in-1 Lexmark that I had been using. This thing was a beast and took up a lot of space, but I liked it because I knew how to work it, and it didn't give me too much trouble until I upgraded to Windows 7. No drivers for Windows 7 because the printer is too old, I assume. I would send things to print, they would print, but then they wouldn't delete, so I had to turned the thing off and back on again to clear the spool thingy. I got pretty good at doing it with my big toe, since it is under the table near my desk. Not very convenient for loading paper, but the only space that I had.

So, in a household with 3 printers, 2 of which are Lexmarks with flatbed scanners, I swapped out the big beast for a smaller, sleeker wireless network model that almost works the way the other did. It's a bit newer and I think that I have it set up to do almost everything but scan to the new laptop. It scans beautifully, but again, it doesn't like Windows 7, so I have to send the scans to the house desktop downstairs, an old XP system, go and save them to a jump drive, yadda yadda yadda. I'm sure there's a more efficient way to do it, but at the time I needed the scanner and was changing printers,  I was of course on a deadline and didn't want to futz around, figuring out the gorey details. Alternatively, I can use the old beast with the old desktop for scanning and that works really well. It seems to me that trying to troubleshoot wastes more time than I'm willing to spend, it's easier and faster for me to do what I know how to do, rather than look at all the twain things and whatever all else is going on in the background. But as long as it gets the job done, I don't suppose there's too much to do about it except live with the little inconveniences. Of course, I could go out and buy a new printer scanner, but then I would have to install it, you get the idea. Although, that might be a way for me to learn something new...