A printer question and a whinge

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elpenguino

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#2669553 7-Mar-2021 17:12

In general, it sounds like you're expressing frustration about support and application lifetimes. I work with a mac user and he experiences the same thing so it's not something that only affects the world of windows.

Just because something works now doesn't mean it will continue to - obviously the issue of support is an area that is important in the real world and keeps IT people busy. Applications become abandoned, even open source ones, and device support is dropped. The landfills are packed with devices that worked perfectly well but don't have drivers for a more modern OS.

Sometimes you do have to just move on, even if it's a PITA (or wallet).

Virtual machines are one way of extending the useful life of an app, if your machine has the horsepower to run one.

Most of the posters in this thread are just like chimpanzees on MDMA, full of feelings of bonhomie, joy, and optimism. Fred99 8/4/21

richms

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#2669560 7-Mar-2021 17:35

If the ink is empty then perfect time to spend the $30 on a new one that will get a few more years of support.

Richard rich.ms

Rikkitic

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#2669562 7-Mar-2021 17:40

elpenguino:

In general, it sounds like you're expressing frustration about support and application lifetimes. I work with a mac user and he experiences the same thing so it's not something that only affects the world of windows.

Just because something works now doesn't mean it will continue to - obviously the issue of support is an area that is important in the real world and keeps IT people busy. Applications become abandoned, even open source ones, and device support is dropped. The landfills are packed with devices that worked perfectly well but don't have drivers for a more modern OS.

Sometimes you do have to just move on, even if it's a PITA (or wallet).

Virtual machines are one way of extending the useful life of an app, if your machine has the horsepower to run one.

My real frustration is with the mentality that supports this kind of behaviour. I am an old radical and I get upset about things like consumer plastic packaging and the lack of adequate recycling infrastructure. This is actually improving, but painfully slowly and only in the tiniest drips as the business sector steadfastly resists any measure that might affect their bottom line. It is not just environmentalism. It is across the board wastefulness and profit-driven consumerism. We actually are killing the planet. Maybe we already have. If I was dictator of the world, I'm sure I would make things much worse, but at least I could force manufacturers to clean up their own bloody messes and do things like require anyone who produces anything for sale, to support the product forever, up to and including its final disassembly and recycling. Nothing that works in any fashion at all should ever end up in a landfill! That is the height of irresponsible wastefulness and any enterprise that facilitates that needs to be called out and made accountable.

Apart from that, it turns out that my printer can be made to work with Windows 10, but that information isn't exactly easy to come by. Microsoft, which wants everyone to upgrade everything, doesn't go out of their way to tell you. Canon, which wants to keep selling new! improved! printers to everyone, isn't keen to advertise it either. Things need to change.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

nitro

657 posts

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#2669854 8-Mar-2021 10:03

Rikkitic:

My real frustration is with the mentality that supports this kind of behaviour. I am an old radical and I get upset about things like consumer plastic packaging and the lack of adequate recycling infrastructure. This is actually improving, but painfully slowly and only in the tiniest drips as the business sector steadfastly resists any measure that might affect their bottom line. It is not just environmentalism. It is across the board wastefulness and profit-driven consumerism. We actually are killing the planet. Maybe we already have. If I was dictator of the world, I'm sure I would make things much worse, but at least I could force manufacturers to clean up their own bloody messes and do things like require anyone who produces anything for sale, to support the product forever, up to and including its final disassembly and recycling. Nothing that works in any fashion at all should ever end up in a landfill! That is the height of irresponsible wastefulness and any enterprise that facilitates that needs to be called out and made accountable.

Apart from that, it turns out that my printer can be made to work with Windows 10, but that information isn't exactly easy to come by. Microsoft, which wants everyone to upgrade everything, doesn't go out of their way to tell you. Canon, which wants to keep selling new! improved! printers to everyone, isn't keen to advertise it either. Things need to change.

i'm glad you're not 'dicatator of the world'! i think you're only trying to see things from your own perspective. if something like you mentioned was mandated, no business will ever survive.

any company has responsibilities to their shareholders. by and large, that is to turn a profit. profit allows businesses to grow and re-invest in themselves to advance technology and develop new products.

wastefulness is never a goal. and, believe it or not, for a lot of products, neither is planned obsolescence. it's just that people are constantly finding ways to make things better.

in certain industries, the same products have to be reinvented simply because the parts used to make them are no longer being manufactured - something the company has no control over.

if people just stuck to what is known, we wouldn't have electric cars... and the old gas guzzlers will forever be 'killing the planet'. (of course, one can argue that we'd still be on horses and carts.) the same with incandescent bulbs versus led lighting. insert dozes of other examples here, along with production processes that have improved over time.

more in line with this topic, canon cannot plan for what microsoft will do with their next operating system, let alone one several generations later. in the same boat, microsoft cannot forever clip their wings trying to support legacy products if it means restricting innovation in their new ones. for example, they're doing quite well with xbox backward compatibility, so product life of those games are extended but it is not achieved by keeping the old model XBOXes working - so there are different ways to approach this.

if innovation is hindered, there would be less competition and that is never good for consumers.

Rikkitic

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#2669868 8-Mar-2021 10:22

I think you are also trying to only see things from your perspective. I am not arguing against innovation or even profitability, but the way things are currently set up, companies don't pay the real cost of producing their products. Once something is out the door, it is no longer their problem. When the item breaks or is no longer supported, the manufacturer bears no responsibility for it. This kind of thing is poisoning our planet.

I don't claim to have the answers, but if manufacturers were forced to take responsibility for the things they produce all the way down the chain to end of life, they would certainly find ways to do things much differently. They should be made to take back what can no longer be used and dispose of it themselves. The cost of that should be included in their consumer pricing. If Microsoft doesn't want to support something anymore, then they have to buy it back from consumers who no longer have the use of it. There needs to be a fundamental change in the way things are done. Not that I expect that to happen.

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Batman

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#2669873 8-Mar-2021 10:33

Rikkitic:

This is a question, and it is also a whinge. I am in the process of upgrading a Windows 10 desktop for general use. This includes transferring some programmes and installing some printers, all of which work perfectly well under Win 7.

My whinge is the need for forced upgrades. Of course Microsoft defenders will insist that the Internet will break if any ‘outdated’ software is allowed on it, and upgrading is necessary and GOOD, and what is the problem with having something that is current?

The problem is that I, and I imagine others, use certain programmes in very specific ways. I don’t need or want all the fancy added-value crap that every update comes burdened with. I don’t want to have to relearn how my favourite software works, if it still works at all. I don’t want new whiz-bang features. I like what I’ve got, I like the way it works, and I don’t care if it is 20 years old! If I need something better, I will get something better. I don’t want it being forced on me through an update.

But my old stuff won’t work anymore. That is my whinge. Actually, I am pretty good at getting it to work anyway. With the right settings, and the necessary tweaks, and certain hacks found on-line by smarter people than me who ran into the same problems, with a lot of fiddling and hassle, I usually can get it to work pretty much like it did before. So why can’t Microsoft?

Yeah, the apologists will argue that Microsoft does support its products for a period of time, but then it expects you to move on. My problem with that argument is basically this: I have a programme or utility (or ‘app’, if you insist) that I use for a certain purpose. It does exactly what I want, the way I want. But then an OS upgrade comes along and my favourite software doesn’t work anymore, or it does random bizarre things. Maybe I can find something new that will do the same job. But maybe I can’t. Maybe there isn’t anything that will do the same job, at least not in the same way. So why should I have to pay to buy something new that won’t do what I want, when I already have something old that works just the way I want it? I have a hard time understanding the logic of that.

Worse is the case with my printers, which is what my question is about. I have two of them which work perfectly well under Windows 7. One is a Canon. There is noting at all wrong with these printers. They print like they are supposed to and the quality is excellent. But they are 32-bit and Windows 10 won’t let me install them. It doesn’t give me any help at all. It just says it can’t install 32-bit drivers on a 64-bit system. End of story. Nor can I find anything on-line that might make this possible. No updated drivers, nothing, nada, zip. Why should this be?

I almost never need to print anything. Probably not more than once a year on average. But occasionally I do, and I need to have a printer available for those occasions. According to Microsoft (and the printer manufacturers), I have to go out and spend my limited money on a new machine just to print once a year so my good-functioning old one can go into a landfill. Is this planned obsolescence or what?

Anyway, that is my question: Is there any way to get around this? I have a workaround and it is a really dumb one. I am just keeping my Win 7 system in reserve so I can use it for printing. If I run into any more issues like this, I may just go back to it altogether. At least it works.

it's not just microsoft

i have microsoft android and apple products

everytime their OS updates to a newer better and bigger number half my apps stop working with no way of going around that

i've accepted this as a fact of life

you pay tax, your apps stop working, you die

1101

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#2669878 8-Mar-2021 10:44

The issue isnt MS's fault.
Its the printer manufacturers (not just Canon) abandoning products.

They are happy to keep selling you the EXPENSIVE ink carts, but wont give you Win10 drivers .

The printer model is approx 10 years old . So its pretty much end of life.
Thats just the way things are now.

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Rikkitic

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#2669947 8-Mar-2021 11:08

1101:

The issue isnt MS's fault.
Its the printer manufacturers (not just Canon) abandoning products.

They are happy to keep selling you the EXPENSIVE ink carts, but wont give you Win10 drivers .

The printer model is approx 10 years old . So its pretty much end of life.
Thats just the way things are now.

That's why things have to change. We really are killing the planet. It is not an exaggeration. Maybe (or maybe not) we could get away with this kind of behaviour when there were only two billion people and most of them accepted a subsistence existence. That is no longer the case.

I am not only singling Microsoft out on this. I was just using them as a familiar example. Surely the printer manufacturers are even worse. But people, all people - consumers and producers - have to change the way they think about this kind of thing. Time really is running out.

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Hammerer

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#2670079 8-Mar-2021 13:34

Rikkitic:

This is a question, and it is also a whinge. I am in the process of upgrading a Windows 10 desktop for general use. This includes transferring some programmes and installing some printers, all of which work perfectly well under Win 7.

My whinge is the need for forced upgrades ...

I can't see the forced upgrade you are talking about in the original post. You are able to keep your Windows 7 system as a "workaround" so the OS is still working.

Anyway, I'm willing to defend Microsoft on your whinges, for good reasons which have mostly been mentioned by others.

I add improved security as an important reason to upgrade more regularly. The Windows 10 architecture is much more secure than Windows 7. Even without using more modern hardware, which unlocks more security features, Windows 10 is much more secure than Windows 7.

https://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/enterprise/windows10/win10-win7-security-comparison.pdf

Rikkitic:

Worse is the case with my printers, ...

As it turns out, the "worse" example was simply about needing some support:

Don't buy from companies that don't support their products to keep up with OS updates for as long as you intend to use your system. I aim for 10 years of software support as a good target because the vast majority of computers die within 9 years anyway. Microsoft does well with this because it provides Windows with 10 years mainstream support plus 5 years of extended support. Canon has improved support for printer drivers but, in my experience, HP has done a lot better.
Install the latest drivers from the vendor's website. Do not blindly rely on Microsoft update for the best printer drivers or, for that matter, the best chipset drivers, the best display drivers, etc.
Use universal printer drivers (UPD) because they incorporate support for as many devices as possible so there's no need to go searching for specific drivers for each printer. A UPD has been an option for HP printers since 2005 and still works with printers back to the 1990s. So I installed HP UPD software for the model 4350 and later upgraded to the 4650 - no software update was required from the HP website.

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