Showing posts with label brother. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brother. Show all posts

Sunday, December 10, 2006

At least he spoke English good.

Are you guys shitting me with the printer installation? I haven't had this much fun since I tried hooking a daisy wheel printer to a Leading Edge 386SX.

It took me almost TWO WEEKS to finally print. I'm using a Brother 2070N Network printer. There are, of course, few to no actual instructions anywhere on the net, just conflicting advice. Brother's and Apple's sites are useless. The problem is I am consistently getting an Error: -50. Guess what? Apple's site does not mention Error -50 anywhere. That stuff is infuriating under any circumstance. You have an error message? TELL US WHAT IT IS OR DON'T HAVE AN ERROR MESSAGE.

And I am loathe to call for help because 1) I am loathe to call for help and 2) this problem involves a printer, a computer and a router which means that after failing to help me, they will blame one or both of the other two.

Turns out my pessimism was overly optimistic. I get the Apple guy on the phone (Canadian?). I explain what I'm doing. He walks me through the installation. We keep getting Error: -50. He explains how Error -50 means something is wrong with the printer driver and I have to call Brother. So I do. And they solve it in about five minutes.

What was wrong? Well first, the Mac "hassle free" installation has printer setups in two places - in the System Preferences and, buried under Finder\Applications\Utilities, Printer Setup Utility. The whole time I was in the Printer Setup Utility trying to install with the IP Printer instead of the Default Browser. What a jackass I am! How obvious was that?! Well, apparently not obvious enough for Apple Support since they didn't have a clue I wasn't even on the right page. Support scoreboard: Microsoft=0, Apple=0, Symantec=$39.95.

Printer installation. Please tell me what other inside jokes I'm going to run into.