 |
| Register | Login | |||||
 |
Main
| Memberlist
| Active users
| Calendar
| Chat
| Online users Ranks | FAQ | ACS | Stats | Color Chart | Search | Photo album |
|
| | ||
|
| Register | Login | |||||
|
Main
| Memberlist
| Active users
| Calendar
| Chat
| Online users Ranks | FAQ | ACS | Stats | Color Chart | Search | Photo album |
|
| | ||
| 0 users currently in Hardware / Software. |
| User | Post |
| FreeDOS + Posts: 1153/1312 |
Lexmark is something you just want to avoid at all costs, seriously.
For decent printers, Epson and HP are excellent. Hell, HP released their official drivers' source code under the GPL, so the support is awesome no matter what OS you're using. |
| paulguy Posts: 66/71 |
USBTrace seems decent and it's easy to find a crack for. I knew of this free one but i forget the name, I'll try to find it again. |
| HyperHacker Posts: 4566/5072 |
Meh, returned it already.  Indeed, Lexmark seems to make decent hardware but just terrible software, and some of their printers actually blend all three colours to make black, killing ink faster than a bullet to the head kills a mouse.
But rather than closing this thread... anyone know a program that can log data going in and out a specific USB port? Could be of use should I ever try to write a driver for something in the future. [edit] I'm glad to say the HP Photosmart C3100 I replaced it with is better. It still has the bloat problem but not nearly as bad. Windows pulled a rather mean trick when I ran the Add Hardware Wizard. It found and copied the driver files like it usually does, and then it ran the installer.  I'm not sure just what the installer wanted to do but it stopped because I didn't have FOUR HUNDRED MEGABYTES free on my system partition. Whatever the case, the state it was left in after this failure seems good - it prints and scans without a bunch of fancy junk and barely any HD space was actually used; still 200MB free. (Yeah, need a new hard drive next.  )
What is it though with printer drivers being so ridiculously bloated? Other devices' drivers rarely need more than a few KB, even printers were this way a few years ago. Why has every printer manufacturer ever suddenly decided every customer wants 27 bloated, poorly-designed programs to replace the perfectly good ones built into Windows, and not bothered with an option to install drivers only? It's no wonder people throw away perfectly good computers so often; they get clogged up with all this crappy software and spyware, slow to a crawl, and get thrown out when a simple reinstall and a dose of common sense (or even just a geek to install some good software) would fix them. The computer in the living room has as much RAM as mine and a faster CPU, but mine runs circles around it just because it's busy with SpySweeper, some sort of terribly ugly Compaq program launcher, etc. </rant> |
| Metal Man88 Posts: 578/701 |
Replace the wavs with recordings of silence and delete the extra copies--and then attempt to see if you can install separate scanner drivers.
That might work, but the Lexmark I have is so bad I won't even use it. |
| HyperHacker Posts: 4550/5072 |
Surely I'm not the only one who bought this thing and was appalled at the "drivers" that...
It'd be a shame to have to return what seems like perfectly good hardware just because the included software is by far the worst I've ever seen. Windows, of course, has no default drivers for this. Usually when that happens I put in the install CD (with Autorun disabled) and have it look again and it sorts through all the crap, picks out the actual driver files and installs them. In this case it just ran the installer! WTF? Here I thought that method was safe. |
