BUT, on the other hand, I never could get my old Lexmark to work under Linux. Still, at peanuts for a printer/copier/scanner, who cares any more?

Any better places to shop than NewEgg?

but…but… but… then, if they did that …. they would not be confusing any more.

And the mystique would die.

Anywho, the original article most likely involves someone with pre-Vista printer drivers installed on their Vista machine. Probably the fault of the printer manufacturer not releasing Vista drivers in order to force people to replace their printers … Not windows fault.

Nickname_unavailable suggested the same thing in a comment on my blog – that the driver might be for XP, and I’m running Vista.

Here’s my reply to NA:

In this case, I know the printer driver was for Vista. When the new printer arrived, our tech support guys hadn’t put the driver on the network yet. So they did the next best thing: they put the install CD next to the printer, so those of us who needed to print to that printer could install the driver.

The driver CD helpfully had a separate directory for “Windows XP” and “Windows Vista” (and “Mac OSX”, IIRC). I installed the driver for Vista.

So no, this is not a case of pre-Vista printer drivers installed on a Vista machine.

But I have to ask – why would Vista allow itself to install drivers for another OS (Win XP) if those drivers are not compatible, anyway? Vista allowing itself to install known-broken (i.e. non-Vista) drivers doesn’t make sense to me. You’d think Microsoft would protect themselves against that, if mixing drivers was such a bad deal.

Really makes you wonder how many Linux and Mac people just didn’t know what the heck they were doing with Windows and took the easy default of blaming the car instead of the loose nut behind the wheel.

I’m the Linux in Exile guy – hi there! Actually, I do know what I’m doing on both platforms. Before I became a manager, I was a UNIX systems administrator. I still hold an RHCE, hasn’t expired yet. And around the time I was doing UNIX sysadmin, I also doubled as the PC support tech at our office (same office I’m at now) supporting the Windows laptops and PCs. I went through A+ back then, too.

Outside of that, I founded and worked on several open source software projects. I prefer to stay private, so I won’t name the projects I created. But you know some of them. I also contributed patches and updates to GNU Emacs, several F/OSS games, and tons of [mostly file] utilities. (Yes, these patches were accepted into the source trees.)

So I’m not complaining about the broken behavior of Windows because I lack any kind of technical knowledge.

You may ask “Why are you blogging about Windows?” Every few months, you’ll see a staff writer for some tech magazine claim he’s going to try Linux exclusively for a month or so. When the “experiment” is over, the writer usually has lots to say about how this or that thing doesn’t work “right” in Linux, because it doesn’t work just like Windows does. If mag writers can do this with Windows-Linux, I think it’s fair to do the same with Linux-Windows.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to run Linux at work since about 2002. My previous bosses knew about this, and supported it. A few years ago, we got a a new boss who didn’t see things exactly that way. So I was asked to move back to Windows, at least for work. The difference between Windows and Linux has been shocking, to say the least. Since I find it interesting when long-time Windows users experiment with Linux for the first time, I thought it might be equally interesting for this long-time Linux user to blog about my first experience running Windows in over 6 or 7 years.

When I blog about something being “broken” in Windows, or something in Windows that is confusing, it’s because that feature really is broken or confusing. At least, compared to Linux.

HP PSC 3200xi full Windows driver: 300MB (actually, ~800MB unzipped and installed). I kid you not. My jaw dropped when I read the manual. (Basic driver: 31MB.)

The spooler, which was still running and trying to print a borked document, had disappeared from any access via the user. It was therefore impossible to stop it. The only way to make it go away would have been to print the thirty or forty thousand pages of paper or to reinstall the system.

I assumed as much, just begin a jackass I guess… But in theory, some service / process had to be running the diver, and you could shut it down, if you could figure out what that process was. Although I’m not too sure how easy that would be in Windows 95, XP would be cake.

Ken: I sense that you have some training from Microsoft, because you really know what you are doing. When it comes to blaming the victim.

Yes, as Stephanie points out, I assure you that the user of the machine in question from LIE knows what he is doing and the people who set up the system do as well, except for the sad fact that someone, somewhere, has been paid off to use Windows only.

Did I say that out loud?