I’ve now had a few problems, where a customer buys a Vista computer, and then tries to get either an existing printer, or a new printer, to work (with little success)

It seems that the XP driver CDs will flatly refuse to work, and most printer manufacturers still don’t ship CDs with vista drivers.

That leaves the customer to hunt around the internet, looking for a similar driver.

In one case, I was working on a new Brother inkjet multifunction printer / fax / scanner. It also had usb, ethernet, and wireless capabilities.

So I think: excellent, wireless printing, what a great idea.

Well, the printer drivers on CD refuse to work. I download a huge file with the vista drivers.

I follow the instructions, and setup wireless (802.11G) on both the router, the printer, and the laptop.

I unpack the vista drivers. They get placed into 2 folders, both with a setup.exe file… now which setup do I run? The readme files don’t say… eeney, meaney, miney moe!

I take an educated guess, and I’m right.

As the install proceeds, I’m given the choice of either usb, or ethernet/wireless. I choose wireless. After the install process completes, I need to restart the PC.

After the restart, I can see 2 printers and a fax device under the printers section of control panel.

I do a test print, but the prints just sit in the queue.

I try reinstalling the driver, but it still refuses to print.

I could spend hours tracking down the exact settings for the port settings of the printer, but we eventually decide to just go with the usb connection (and luckily, it works flawlessly).

It seems that printer support is one of my biggest issues with vista (yep, MS will say its not their fault, printer makers will blame MS (or say it will take a while to develop thousands of vista drivers… (I can’t see why they have to develop so many different models…))