Hot:

Something I heard about last week but haven’t had time to put up here is the “God Mode” feature.  If you want to have a common area to access all your settings features, rather than navigate in the normal Control Panel method you may find this mode to be a bit of a time saver.

To enable simply Create a New Folder and name it this:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

That will change the folder icon to a Control Panel icon and will then give you direct access to all the features in a simple list format.  If you prefer having the short explainations they will be missing.

So far no comments from Microsoft about this.  Enjoy.

Hot:

No. 

Why do I think so?  

Simple.   When it comes to using technology a term that is used a great deal is ‘ROI’ or Return on Investment.   Another term that is used is ‘TCO’ or Total Cost of Ownership.   These variables account for costs associated with normal use and regularly maintaining equipment, what it costs to keep running, how much IT resources does it require, etc.    Since the Brother MFC 420 is a Printer, copier, scanner, fax machine all in one nice simple package.   I figure it’s far too complex of a system for the folks at Brother to make work nicely all together within a reasonable ROI.   I understand it’s designed for the SOHO market but when you’re a one person operation 4 hours downtime trying to scan a document can really affect your ability to get anything else done.  

 

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It does work, when it works and works well.

 

In fairness, once you get the software installed and setup it works fine.  But if I reboot the PC or shut off the MFC unit, then for some strange reason my PC keeps losing ability to do ONE thing (scanning typically but printing and faxing also have been affected), forcing a COMPLETE reinstall of all the software again.  Sure it tells you to be selective, but for the most part it’s either an all or nothing install (fonts and the control center can be left out but everything else MUST be installed/reinstalled or you will have issues). 

 

In the six months we have used this product we have reinstalled the software nine (9) times.  You have to research the uninstallation doc from their support web site prior to reinstalling, otherwise you will end up with duplicate drivers.  It took me three installations to determine that having 3 printers, 3 scanners, and 3 fax drivers were not appropriate, forcing a proper cleanup and reinstallation.

 

After our sixth installation (which broke when we rebuilt our LAN) we decided to rebuild the box from scratch for other reasons, but one on the list was to ensure a clean installation of all the MFC drivers, and then did our seventh install.  This was the longest lasting installation to date (3 weeks).  We then attempted our eighth install to fix the scanner which died, which did not solve the issue, then tech support sent us links to new software from Brother and performed our ninth install which so far is still working.

 

Get Tech Support on the phone, we have a problem.

 

During these phases we have had to waste even more numerous hours sitting on hold waiting for tech support.  The queue’s are very slow, and then when you get someone ‘they’ only want to spend 10 minutes with you, and then get you off the phone.   Considering you or I can wait 30 minutes or more on hold to talk to them, I find this very disrespectful.

 

10:30 Attempted to scan from PC.  Device not found.  Prints ok.  Try to manually scan directly from the device, will not perform any action with scanning.

 

11:00 Reinstall of software (8th), still not working.

 

11:18 Called tech support in queue.

 

11:45 Tech support advises they will send me an email pointing towards the uninstallation doc and the new driver software.

 

12:30 No email received, Second Call.  Got into arguing match about receipt of email.  Very unprofessional of Brother to argue whether or not MY email works.  I built my MTA/MUA AND bind, so I know it works.  I get over 200 emails a day on my work account. 

 

1:30  After a Third Call I finally get tech support to provide me with a link to the uninstall doc.  DNS issues with ISP caused issues connecting to site, probably delivery or routing of email also, but resolved.

 

2:00 Finally received a link from tech support for the new software via email.

 

2:15 Finished removing software, noting errors and variants and other inconsistancies with the wording of the uninstallation document.

 

2:35 Rebooted and reinstalled software, confirmed working all componants.

 

2:40  Finally scanned my document. 

 

Total time from start to finish:  4.17 Hours.  

 

@ $90.00/per hour (which is our labor rate for adminstration costing calculations) this means to scan one page cost our company $375.30 labour dollars for scanning one page document.  This affected two people.

 

Factoring in the cost of using IT resources to install and uninstall, IT time @120.00/per hour for the removal and reinstallation add’s another 1.50 hours for an amount of $180.00.  This affected one more additional person.

 

Total cost was $555.30 to scan one page.  Not including the cost of equipment or ink, paper, toner, etc.  We would assume that it should take ONE person roughly 10 minutes total or 0.17 hours at $90 or a cost of $15.30.  This is a difference of $540.00.  Yes, our admin rates are quite high but we do pay our employee’s well.

 

Looking at our history over the last six months this particular product keeps overrunning our operational costs.  We are certainly seeking a better solution, and will probably seek out Canon’s solutions.  Granted this product is not an enterprises class product, but given that there are at most 5 people using our network at any given moment, for it to not be effective even in this environment would be fair for me to say.  Perhaps if you only have it connected to one PC via USB, the MFC device works far superiour, but we did buy this on the basis we could connect via our network switch.

 

I do not understand why Brother cannot do this correctly, this isn’t their first time in this arena (Multi-function products).  But suffice to say, IF you never turn off the MFC unit, and IF you never reboot any of the PC’s that this product has it’s software installed on it works great!  It’s a wonderful product once it’s working 100%.  Too bad it never stays that way.  Of course it also never completely breaks either.

 

What was even more disrespectful of Brother was that they didn’t ‘care’ about fixing their documentation
nor in hearing my advisement on how to improve this.  Well if any Brother executives read this article, please review my walkthrough below.  Some of it may be petty to intelligent thinking people, but I hazard who qualifies as such, and would rather make the document dummy-proof for all people, not just the smart ones.  Saves tech support calls.  Maybe then you can get a decrease in calls to tech support and reduce your hold times for people with bigger problems.  In my instance yesterday I had to call them THREE times, use over FOUR HOURS of time to get two WEB LINKS.  How inefficient is that?  I asked them to give me the links over the phone and got the excuse the ‘link is too big’.  I guess they’ve never heard of tinyurl.  When I mentioned using this, they said ‘we can’t do that’.  This is technical support huh?  Pity.

 

When we brought the product into our environment we decided to connect it to our print server.  This is really just a simple PC running XP that has all the printers connected to it.  Most requests to print get sent to a custom spooler I wrote which then allows you to come over to the machine and forward the job to the appropriate printer. 

 

The first time I decided to use a network connection as this allowed me more flexibility with the other printers I own to still allow me to receive a fax on the MFC, and print on one of the lasers without building a queue for the jobs.  So I noticed it supported DHCP and decided that would be the way to go.  For a while (holidays) the unit was not going to be used so we turned off the MFC.  Upon powering on again, none of the software would talk to the printer.  Why?  Because it now had a new IP address, thanks to DHCP.  I had to reinstall the software to get it working again.  However without a ‘complete clean’ uninstall of the products software PRIOR to reinstallation will cause you the next issue duplicate drivers.  Yes, now the system registers FAX#2, and SCANNER#2, and PRINTER#2 since you have now installed the product twice.  A third time causes serious malfunctions and instability of the machine which I believe to be due to the fact that your only permitted to install this software on two machines.  So now we incurred additional calls from staff indicating their documents are not printing due to selecting the ‘older’ driver vs. the ‘newer driver’.

 

Now if you have a couple hours to kill, you can call the technical support line for help.   They can provide you with a link that I have supplied here to remove the software.  

Understanding it is another issue, let me explain with a walkthrough the document:

 

Note: this document is quoted in italic, regular text is my comment.

1. Unplug the printer cable.

 

This term is very ambiguous.  A Traditional ‘printer cable is a parallel cable that connects to a parallel port on a PC to the same port on the printer.  This product HAS NO parallel port.  It DOES provide a USB and Network interface for connecting the product to a PC/Network.  Why it doesn’t explain:

1. Open the MFC by lifting the cover from the right hand side, and lock the hinge in place.
2. Once open, disconnect either the USB cable and/or Cat5 Networking cable.  Ensure there is no cable connecting the MFC to the Computer or any Networking Equipment.

 

1. Click on START , CONTROL PANEL , ADD & REMOVE PROGRAMS , and remove the following programs: MFL Pro .

r

 

The actual program as listed is ‘Brother MFL Pro‘.  Since the add/remove software application lists all the selections aphabeticaly this would be important for finding the proper install file for the MFC, rather than looking for something that doesn’t actually exist [anymore | in this case | due to new setup], whatever is applicable.

 

1. Click on START , SETTINGS and PRINTERS & FAXES and delete the Brother driver & the PC-Fax driver.

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Well I found a fully successful removal of the software at STEP 2 discovered that there was nothing to do here.

 

1. In the “Printers & Faxes” window, you will click on File and Server Properties .

 

Yes.

 

1. Click on the “Drivers” tab.

 

Yes they could have combined this step, but it’s more clear as two.

 

1. Select the “BrotherMFC-xxxx” driver or any other Brother driver, then click REMOVE .

 

Ok.  Um, there is nothing here.  Three steps wasted.  In fairness perhaps this ‘could have been here’ so checking is preferable regardless of the result.

 

1. From “My Computer”, click on Tools and Folder Options , and then click on View . Put a check mark on “Show hidden files and folders” and uncheck “Hide extensions for known file types” and then click on OK .

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This has already been done, but confirmed regardless.  Another potential wasted step.  Granted many people may not have this option previously set and will require it for proper performing of the next two steps.  Again in fairness, this is a well documented step.

 

Then double click on your C:\\ drive and the delete the Brother folder and also delete the Brother folder in C:\\Programs Files.

 

Done.  However if you installed the MFC solution say to drive D: instead of C: you would find that the brother software ineffectively installs in C: in two locations additionally also in D: as directed.  So in this case you would have to search for THREE folders named ‘brother’ (C:\\, C:\\Program Files, D:\\Program Files) and remove them.  Very unclear wording of this requirement.

 

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1. From the C:\\ drive double click on the “Windows” folder and the “INF” folder.

 

Ok

 

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1. Search for OEM files that are related to Brother and delete those files. To see if it’s related to Brother, you double click on the first OEM files on the list (For example: OEM1.inf). If the OEM file is related to Brother then close that window and delete that file. And delete the PNF file that follows it with the same number (For example: OEM1.PNF). If the file is NOT related to Brother then don’t delete that file , just close that window and continue with the other OEM files. You have to go through all the OEM files to make sure nothing is left from the Brother software.

r

 

Unfortunately this is very vague.  Let me give you a example.

 

I currently have 1469 objects in this particular directory.  Of these 21 meet the criteria as selected above.  I know since I wiped this hard disk and reinstalled windows XP sp2, that only TWICE have I installed this, so perhaps the setup uses many of these, or perhaps it uses a select number.  Either way I have no further information to differentiate these files from the ‘related to Brother’ ones.  So which do I delete?  INF files tend to be fairly important and I certainly don’t want to determine them all.

 

I simply ignored this step as I was not about to inspect 21 items to determine which is which.  Why don’t they log this in a installation logfile, then review that to determine which OEM files to remove?  Makes sense doesn’t it?  Too bad Brother didn’t think so.

 

1. Also in the Windows folder, look for the TWAIN folder and the Twain_32folder. You will double click on those folders and delete any folder that begins with brmf.

 

Only Twain_32 for me, I simply tossed the entire directory.

 

1. Then open the “Registry” window by clicking on START , Run and type regedit and click OK .

 

Yes.

 

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1. From the
   left column, open the folder called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE , then he SOFTWARE  Folder.

 

Yes.

 

1. From the SOFTWARE folder, delete the an>Brother Key.

 

Yes.

 

1. Restart the Computer.

 

But once you do STEP 2 it wants to reboot.  So, if your not careful, after doing STEP 2, you may reboot at this point, and then have to finish the steps in the remainder THEN REBOOT a second time.

 

I guess I could have mentioned this above eh?

 

Here is the link to the actual document, I hope it works, it gave me a ton of difficulty

 

Document stored at <http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/BSC/public/us/ca/en/faq/faq/000000/002000/000040/faq002040_000.html?reg=us&c=ca&lang=en&prod=mfc210c_all&Cat=15>

 

 

To buy or not to buy, that is the question.

 

So, after all this you hope that you can now do a ‘clean’ reinstallation of the software without multiple drivers appearing all over.  It’s too bad Brother doesn’t care about the quality of it’s documentation, only that it’s accurate enough that you can go to it.  If they had clarified a couple of the terms they misused, in the first place, this may have alleviated a great deal of confusion, but I leave that determination to you.  The manual is even worse reading and tends also to misinform you about the proper steps to fix or troubleshoot installations or broken installations.

 

Some people like very accurate information, others like very generalized information.  Some vary depending on the circumstance.  In any event it’s difficult to get the CORRECT information without some interpretation. 

 

If I was to review this product for it’s actual performance it would get very good marks.  It goes through ink in ridiculous quantities but name a printer these days that doesn’t.

 

However the constant breaking of various components forcing uninstall/reinstalls is very annoying.  Further discussion with Brother indicates this is very abnormal, but I have no way to compare this, except with my other 3 printers none of which are brother products and none of which have EVER had this problem.  Of course only one of them also uses a network connection (HP) the rest are either USB or parallel.  The other parallel is also connected to the network but it uses a custom driver to link over this cable the printer to the network.

At this point I don’t think we are going to continue with this product if a part fails again, that just may be the time we retire the unit.  Let’s hope it was a simple buggy driver product and we have gotten past this and will never have this occur again. 

 

P.S.  If you have any stories yourself on this product line I’d be glad to hear your input. 

Hot:

As I’m sure you’re aware Microsoft had rumored to release Vista this year, but instead decided to delay its release.  We won’t be able to purchase Vista until 2007 now, but until next summer Microsoft has given everyone the opportunity to try Vista in beta test until it’s released.  I don’t think Microsoft has ever before offered a new OS release under a completely open beta. 

Downloading Vista is truly an easy thing, but as anyone who has used windows before, the real challenges occur during the installation and continue into the setup, and do not stop once you are logged in.

There are some nice cleanups and improvements over XP, but I’m afraid that I certainly understand why this product was delayed and certainly why there are still lots of unhappy MVP’s and users.

I have some feedback and initial impressions of the Vista product which I will discuss in future blogs but right now I want to give everyone the information about acquiring and installing Vista.

Keep in mind, getting Vista and installing it isnt any more difficult than any other OS installer or previous versions of Windows, unless you introduce limitations.  Vista really wants to use a powerful machine, and will seriously take advantage of newer hardware.  That certainly doesnt mean you have to upgrade or even buy a new PC for Vista, though it may not be a bad idea.  The time you will run into problems is when you have a box that barely ran XP, and you decide to upgrade/install Vista on this.  That would probably be a bad idea.  If you meet the minimum specifications you should be fine.  If you meet or exceed the recommended specifications you should be able to see and use a very powerful OS.

To start first thing to do is get the software and the license.

The first thing to do is to go to Microsoft’s Vista web page and download the ISO file.  This is a large roughly 3GB file so be prepared to spend some time downloading this, ensure you have enough free space available.  A high speed connection wouldn’t hurt either.  During the initial week of release the download servers were simply overwhelmed and many of the servers and additional processes simply broke.  At the time of writing this, you should have little difficulty as I\’m sure the initial demand has dropped. 

I have a fairly decent cable connection and had the ISO in less than one hour.  I didn’t really time it, I went out for lunch and when I came back I was ready to burn this to a DVD.  An ISO now needs to be burned to the DVD.  Any DVD Burning software that supports ISO images should be effective at making the Vista Installation DVD, in our case we used Nero Burning ROM which is one of the more common and feature rich software for removable media.  Nero was able to quickly create our Installation disk which we booted in our machine for installation.

Yes, a 3GB ISO is not going to fit on a CD, so DVD was the only option which leads to qualification #1 is that you must have a DVD Burner to create the Installation Disk, and the machine your installing to must have a DVD ROM drive.  I have heard some folks attempting to break this into a multi-CD format but I couldn’t be bothered to attempt this.  However this did limit a couple installation candidates for me, and I decided to be able to install this on a couple different setups so I decided to go the VMWare route for most of my installations rather than move DVD ROM’s around constantly. 

Ok, so you got the ISO downloaded, now just like a real Installation you need a product key which Microsoft provides you.  When you normally acquire the ISO it will step you through the process to getting a product key, but at the time I acquired it, this was broken.  Later I was able to go back and get one (actually two ) so this was only some confusion on my part trying to decide what I did wrong. 

You will need a Windows Live account (also known as Passport) and this is easy to setup and then allows you to go to the download beta section and then it will present you with both the download link and the product key for you to use.  The really nice thing about this is that the beta is good for one year roughly and this is exceptional.  I do believe microsoft wants as much possible feedback from the community prior to finalizing and releasing this product.  If so this may be the most demanding OS released in history and additionally one of the more supported and user-backed OS’s ever.   I say this because many linux distro’s and Apple are moving into Microsofts markets and taking advantage of the fact that many folks understand the value they get with non-microsoft OS’s and software.  However many users still require (or think they require) Windows in order to use their PC’s.  By offering Vista as a free beta for a full year you allow the users to grow accustomed to the OS, and when they do release it sales should be immediate.  Just like a game company releasing demo’s, this allows them to guage the market, demographic, potential share, potential growth projections based on beta reaction and feedback, etc.

So to say this was simply an ability for Microsoft to release Vista at no cost to ensure quick adoption of the OS would not be entirely incorrect.  I’m sure there were other reasons, some would say security issues, but I don’t think they would delay because of security issues, unless it was a core/fundamental process in one of the new features.  Other reasons may be because key features still don’t work as well as they should.  Regardless once you have your own copy installed you can decide this for yourself.

If you boot your computer from the Vista disk you quickly see a familiar looking setup environment.  One of the main differences is that awful blue background is gone and replaced with a nice web like white background that loads a image.  Since I chose to use VMWare to install Vista with for my first couple tests, I decided to install it on a fresh machine and had considerable problems.  This was apparently more of an issue with VMWare and following the helpful hints on their support forums enabled me finally get past this I only ever had this error with Vista.  No other OS including Windows varieties had this issue. 

I did not attempt this for real, but the idea crossed my mind, and that was to simply mount the install disk vs. burn and run from a DVD-ROM.  This is not recommended. 

The questionnaire was easier than XP in that it allowed you to get the installer running faster with less questions, the disk setup also is more friendly which allows you to pick which disk, and how to set it up and format it prior to you running the OS installer.  The default admin account is still created and the installer will ask you to create a user for your use (or more if you require, however I would not use this method for anything other than home-based/test installation).  For most users this will be enough to get everything working. 

The installer runs and about 45 minutes later (or more) it starts rebooting and initializing the desktop. This is the time to be patient and allow the installer to do its several reboots to get all the hardware initialized and working.  Hopefully you won’t have any issues with this, as I was using VMWare I had no difficulty installing the basic driver set, and when I added specific drivers for video card I was able to quickly find them online and install them.  The only downside to this I had was the numerous reboots before everything was ready to use.  I counted 14 reboots.

The really nice feature of the login screen is that a key set of features
for accessibility are moved here so that when you login, you can choose the features you want to use, otherwise once you login these features are no longer directly available.  I welcomed this change since windows 95 these features have been left as simple tools that any user can enable at any time, and they tend to cause operational issues that confuse users later.   By sticking these features at the login screen allows most users who never use these features to ignore them and move into the desktop with less ability to enable these ‘while using’ the system, whereas for those users who depend on these features they are able to set them before login so they can quickly take advantage of these features.

Now you login and the desktop loads and you are greeted with a familiar desktop with some interesting changes.  The icons on the desktop have increased  and they are much bigger.  You can even make them bigger than the default install.  I could not comprehend this.  I have used software in the past to make these smaller, and I would have jumped for joy to have discovered a ‘shrink’ or ‘smaller’ option for the desktop icons.  Nope.  Regular, huge and really huge only.  The start button has some nice changes which can be easily configured by right clicking on the taskbar and selecting properties.  The system properties have also taken over the traditional display properties when you right click on the desktop background.  This allows you to make the numerous changes as before, plus additional system property changes. This should make moving around the control panel looking for that setting much less likely in Vista.  For the most part the desktop changes are not revolutionary simply evolutionary but still not utilizing all the ideas that have been developed into other desktop UI’s over the last ten years.  Of course now the Vista desktop actually takes advantage of transparnency in the desktop that has actually been around since Windows 2000.  They’ve also added some nice features that take advantage of better utilization of older features.

From here you get to see the ‘Welcome Center’ which is a glorified control panel and allows the user to quickly get to nearly any setting for the system they might be interested in.  Microsoft Update along with the Security Center run immediately putting the checks into protecting your system from hackers and malware, and Microsoft Defender is running along with the Microsoft Firewall also.  Essentially the next thing is to install a Anti-Virus product, and the Security Center takes you to the one Vista-ready product (Trend Micro) but the product is not available for download.  The page indicates that the beta is running and only good til the end of the year, one could decide whether they wish to try this vista-ready product now, or wait for another or to try installing a current stable product and test it on the beta.

Next…New features highlighted and discussed.