So I am at my brothers place in Portland, Oregon for Thanksgiving, and with him being gone during the day I wanted to be able to print map directions or anything else necessary while he was at work. The printer is a Brother MFC-440CN and was a recent purchase so I figured it would easily work with Windows Vista, I couldn’t be more wrong.
I was going to install just the driver but ran into issues as I couldn’t find the actual driver file in what brother had available for download. So instead I tried to download their self installer that bypassed windows and also added their own software for managing ink levels and paper amounts. This while proving successful was also an endless amount of pain.
The printing worked and all seemed fine with the world as I trekked off today to visit Multnomah Falls and Mcminville Dam outside Portland. Upon returning my plan was to take a few pics, resize them in photoshop, maybe edit them a little and then put them up on flickr, but alas photoshop wouldn’t respond. I tried restarting, no dice, I tried checking everything I could think of and still no dice. I sat staring at the task manager and deciphering memory usage for 5 minutes, and could not figure out why the processor and memory were both hovering in the 95+ percentage range.
So I went over in my head, what did I change on the machine? The previous night I had removed the Firefox 3 trunk build for the actual beta build but I figured that would cause no issues. Then it dawned on me, I had installed the printer software and I decided to remove it, figuring what the heck I still had the install information I could make it work again right?
Well upon removing the software presto!, everything worked again and so I figured the printer must have some kind of issues with resource usage or just some kind of odd conflict internally that I don’t have access to fix.
So in closing I have photoshop working, I just can’t print any photos. Now though I need to fix my brothers computer it is having wireless issues.
Oh and if you wanna see the photos you can click the above picture or visit the set here.