Month: February 2008

I have some simple advice for you. Don’t ever, ever, ever buy a Canon product. This evening, I have fired off this missive. To say that I’m furious would be an understatement:

I’ll let you know what they say. Don’t hold your breath, though.

Man From Canon eventually called me last Thursday afternoon. All well and good, except I was at a trade show in Angers, France. Even though I politely explained that I was 500 miles from my non-functioning multifunction, he still tried to talk me through the problem. I politely explained that my WLAN doesn’t have that sort of range and it was very difficult to resolve an issue in a noisy exhibition hall whilst propped against a window balancing notebook, pen, mobile, laptop bag and a collection of brochures. We agreed that he should call me yesterday when I was back in the office.

On reviewing my emails yesterday, I noticed one from Man From Canon. It told me that he would be out of the office until Thursday but had asked a colleague to call. He also offered a possible solution to the problem. Unfortunately, the "solution" was simply another walkthrough of the same steps that we had been over before. For the sake of completeness, I went through it one more time with the same eventual outcome. I emailed a reply to this effect stating clearly what the problem was/is and saying that I was looking forward to a new call and some new ideas.

This morning, he called. Strange, considering he was supposed to be out of the office. Essentially, he told me that, since my multifunction functions just fine on my old XP laptop, it clearly wasn’t a hardware problem. And Canon were satisfied that there was nothing wrong with their driver. And that the problem must be with my laptop hardware – a USB port driver problem, perhaps. So I should call Dell.

What crap. We’ve established that the USB port is functioning correctly and that the issue is that the Canon driver installation software does not complete its process fully.

So, using my not-particularly-extensive knowledge of computing, I’ve got the machine working on my XP laptop via USB and via WLAN to both print and scan. I have then succeeding in reinstalling it on my Vista laptop so that it wil print via the WLAN, although there is no communication via USB and no scanning functionality at all. Thankfully, I use my machine 95% of the time for printing. But for that 5% of the time when I’m scanning, I’ll need to power up the old XP machine, scan the document and then transfer the file to my Vista laptop by email or using a memory stick.

Verdict: the Canon PIXMA MP600R is not a good machine for use with Windows Vista. Canon tech support leaves much to be desired, both online (due to assumed knowledge) and by telephone (whether overseas or in this country – they only seem capable of dealing with known issues and then can only walkthrough the normal setup and installation procedures). In short, I won’t be buying another Canon product and wish I’d forked out the extra cash for the HP C7280.

I finally got through to Canon support and went through the usual re-installation on drivers, checking of settings, etc. I spoke with them twice before, eventually, they upgraded my complaint so that it would be dealt with within the UK and not in Bombay (I’m not opposed to outsourcing per se, but I generally feel that you get a better response from someone in your own timezone and not from somoeone sat at their desk at 2am local time).

On Friday afternoon, a Canon tech person called me and we went through the problem. Unfortunately, I could only spend about 45 minutes with them, as I had to get a train to The Smoke to meet with a bunch of weirdos in a pub. We walked through uninstallation and reinstallation, twice, without success. We also verified that everything was working properly. We left it that he would call me back today (as of 3.30pm, the phone remains silent) after he had investigated the problem further at Canon Tech Guy HQ UK. But his last words were "nope, I’ve not come across that problem before", which did not fill me with optimism.

The current situation is this – I can install my new Canon MP600R multifunction on my old XP laptop with the supplied driver and get them talking to each other via USB or via WLAN, both to print and to scan, which is lovely. I can install the downloadable Vista driver (from the Canon website) on my new Vista laptop and get the laptop and multifunction working with the printer driver over WLAN only, not via USB (I have to use the Add Printer function in Control Panel because there is no USB functionality)- and the scanner driver works not at all. I’ve checked the obvious – the USB port is functioning and I have used the same cable that I used for the XP machine, so I know that is ok. Am I missing something?