[RESOLVED] Vendor Supplied Printer Drivers Faulty

[rjwilke]

I just blew two houres on a simple prinetr installation because the drivers supplied by the printer manufacturer were faulty. It was an Epson Color Stylus 8??. The printer would communicate with the Epson utility program but would not print anything from a Win98m based program. I checked for conflicts, internal cables, external cables, BIOS settings, deleted and reinstalled the Epson software. Finally, installed the Win98 drivers and it worked. Just a warning guys!

[mikevm]

Something like that happened to me once, and after downloading drivers and talking to an Epson Tech support rep, I realized that the Iomega parallel zip drive that my printer was hooked-up through was not powered-up.

Make sure you don't have an obvious problem like that, but sounds like you have it covered by using the win98 drivers

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Plug and Play
or
Plug and Pray?

[rjwilke]

MIKEVM

Thankis for the comment thought I am aware of that issue. If fact, it is also an issue if you are daisychaining a printer off of a scanner. My point was to illustrate that the vendor supplied drivers (the ones that are supposed to be most up to date and we are SUPPOSED to use vs Windows drivers) don't always work. While this has happened to me in only a few instances, each time it has cost me many hours of troubleshooting what should be a routine install.

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by mikevm:
Something like that happened to me once, and after downloading drivers and talking to an Epson Tech support rep, I realized that the Iomega parallel zip drive that my printer was hooked-up through was not powered-up.

Make sure you don't have an obvious problem like that, but sounds like you have it covered by using the win98 drivers

</font>

[Sowulo]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by rjwilke:
MIKEVM

Thankis for the comment thought I am aware of that issue. If fact, it is also an issue if you are daisychaining a printer off of a scanner. My point was to illustrate that the vendor supplied drivers (the ones that are supposed to be most up to date and we are SUPPOSED to use vs Windows drivers) don't always work. While this has happened to me in only a few instances, each time it has cost me many hours of troubleshooting what should be a routine install.


</font>

and Epson drivers can be particularly buggy....

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[mikevm]

Totally agree.
I used to have an Epson Sylus Color 600.
The drivers were a real pain

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Plug and Play
or
Plug and Pray?

[rjwilke]

I wasn't aware that Epson drivers had a poor rep. I will certainly keep that in mind. The other vendor was Diamond for a modem I purchased for a client. The defective drivers made AOL (i know they have their OWN problems) unable to connect with the com port the modem was using. I kept changing com ports but AOL still couldn't find it. It was like a shell game.....finally I downloaded fresh drivers from the Diamond site and AOL found the modem on the first try. I won't tell how much time that took. It was embarassing...