I’m constantly amazed and annoyed that printing takes up 100% of CPU resources on any Windows based PC I use. The dips you see are the lulls while the printer waits for one side of the page to dry before printing on the other side of a duplex inkjet printer.
This Windows Vista driver war with my HP Photosmart C6250 gets nuttier and nuttier all the time. In February, HP’s scanning software decided to store scanned images in folders by month. It did not do that for December or January. Over the past few months, Vista seems to lose sight of the HP printer and reinstalls the driver again and again. It just did it again this evening as I was preparing to use the scanner.
Anyone have any comments on the Canon multi-function fax, scanner, copier, printer devices? I’m probably going to be in the market for one by the end of the year.
Dave Winer’s blog post titled Plan B got me thinking about my own plan B. Winer created a new business venture (NewsJunk) that relied on Twitter. I had just started using Twitter by feeding my own 140 characters or less tech news comments and links on my personal blog sites to provide more tech info. But, when Twitter crashes, which happens daily these days, my web pages don’t render making them difficult or impossible to view. I think I have a Plan B. It is not as easy or simple to use as Twitter. But, it seems very stable and provides a clean RSS feed. Will play with the idea later today.
This Information Week article…
Windows 7 Testing Must Start ASAP, Microsoft Warns Hardware Makers
…notes that Microsoft is imploring hardware vendors to test with Windows 7. That’s good, of course. But, it would also be nice (nicer, in fact) if they would test hardware with Windows Vista now too! Vista still encounters daily internal blue screens with auto-recovery (i.e., I see the message but not the blue screen). Nvidia has been doing a pretty good job of providing updated drivers for my, hmm, four year old PC? But, it hasn’t helped much so far.
Based on the comments on this blog, it looks like I’m not alone in having various hardware driver issues with a PC running Windows Vista.