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.