Vista Printing Saga, Part 1

The other week I bought a new Toshiba laptop from BestBuy, complete with bells and whistles (most of which I will not use) and Vista Home Premium operating system. This is the second laptop connected to my home Wi-Fi network. All of my computers print without problem, except for the new one. It had the following symptoms: All of the print job would look like some alien language or it would print the first page and a couple of lines on the second; beyond that nothing came out of the printer.

After several days of troubleshooting, installing and uninstalling drivers and killing a tree or two, I decided to call the various types of support available to me: Toshiba laptop service, Geek Squad at Best Buy and the Brother Printer Company.

For Toshiba’s part they told me from India that my Brother printer had a known incompatibility issue with Vista (complete nonsense), that they did not help customers set up printers on home networks (unnecessary) and then essentially hung up on me (annoying).

Brother support told me in a persistently snippy voice (irritating), that they have 10 like printers on their network printing fine with Vista (irrelevant because they use wired print servers) and that Microsoft was evil (ok, not that exactly, but she did say it was their fault).

The Geek Squad (just incompetent) told me that “since I didn’t have a wireless printer, it would not work” at which point I told her that she “obviously didn’t know what she was talking about.” After putting me on hold, she said they could help me for $80. I laughed and hung up the phone and followed up by filling out a survey suggesting their “technician” shovel dirt for a living. In the end, the only company who half knew what they were talking about was the printer company (too bad they were just too snotty to help me).

My point is two-fold: One, we are alone when it comes to fixing our computer problems (except for using the experts in Computing and Technology Group at About.com). Two, there is no substitute for persistence. After speaking with all those pseudo-support types, understanding why people hate I.T. departments and thanking WalMart for ruining the basic concept of real customer service, I took a fresh look at the problem. Deciding that I liked the computer more than I wanted to return it, I took one more hour and finally fixed the problem myself. In my next blog, I’ll tell you how.