Obsolescence

I've been away from blogging a few days, trying to get some printer issues worked out. I had recently bought a Canon i9900 printer which will print borderless 13x19 prints. It's a beauty and a speed demon as well. What was weird, is that I would print something and it would spit it out immediately, just like it should.. But if I then pressed Print again, it would take up to 4 minutes to print. Strange, eh? After many emails back and forth with Canon and prowling many a forum and uninstalling, reinstalling printer drivers, defragging, tuning up the registry, dumping temp files, still nothing worked.

Finally a techie in a printer forum suggested that perhaps my usb 2.0 printer port was underpowered. Since my computer is about 3 years old , it didn't come with 2.0 ports, only 1.1 . I had to purchase a Belkin hi-speed 2.0 PCI card with two usb 2.0 ports on it, in order to get hi-speed usb 2.0 components to work. I've had my external hard drive, my card reader, my scanner and my other Canon printer (an S300) printer plugged into that card and the hub that came with it, without a problem. But the i9900 was obviously presenting new challenges. When I decided to unplug this i9900 and plug it into one of my old 1.1 ports on the computer, it worked correctly. Therefore, perhaps the i9900 has bigger power requirements than my other devices did? I plugged my i9900 into my wife's laptop which has native hi-speed usb 2.0 ports and it worked fine on her machine. So perhaps there is a glitch with the Belkin PCI card. So an email to Belkin and now I await their answer. No doubt it will say that there couldn't be a problem and they will send me a replacement card - we shall see.

But that's where I've been - on an all-consuming effort to figure this out. Incredible how long it can take.