Scan fail

When discussing the merits of Aunt Bessie's cooking instructions a few days ago, I did intend giving you the pleasure of a pictorial representation of said pie, which looks every bit as delicious on the box as it did in real life. Sadly a quick reccie of the AB website turned up only a tiny thumbnail, so reluctantly I decided there was nothing for it but to scan the box.

We are the proud owners of a wireless Lexmark printer. The X4580.

A sexy looking beast, I think you'll agree, and it comes with an impressive list of features. Printer, fax, copier and scanner. I don't *quite* believe its stated speed of 18ppm full colour, but to be fair that claim is caveated by the all-important words "up to." Personally I've never known it print a page with any appreciable amount of colour in anything less than 20 seconds, but for our purposes that's fine, and its great benefit is, naturally, that it can sit over there atop the filing cabinet without any physical LAN connection. With just its little wireless indicator glowing a happy green.

True, it does tend to drop the odd packet while printing, at which point both printer and driver are prone to getting totally and utterly confused, requiring a complete reboot of either the printer, or the PC, or occasionally both. But this is a relatively rare occurrence and is nowhere near as annoying as its rather idiosyncratic behaviour when scanning. Which is the point of this tale. I know, I know, you were beginning to wonder whether I'd ever get there.

So there I was with my empty cherry pie box sitting on the glass, and the Lexmark printer - sorry, Multifunction Device - set to 'Scan'. At this point the device offers a list of PCs that it knows about and invites you to select the one you'd like to scan to. So far, so sensible. But then it goes into "Downloading Application List" mode. Yes, it interrogates the chosen PC to find out what apps are installed, so that it can scan your object and launch the right app. You can scan to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Paintshop Pro, PDF, JPEG, or basically anything you have installed that can cope with an image file.

But, see, my problem is, it downloads this application list EVERY TIME.

Now I don't know about you, but once I've got my PC set up it very rarely changes in terms of installed apps. When I can do my documents, websites, email and so on, I'm not one for constantly downloading new apps. But this damned thing will interrogate my PC for each individual scan. It can't even remember the application list DURING a scanning session. But the worst thing of all - and the point of this post (and the reason for the lack of a picture on my cherry pie cooking instructions post) - is that on around 50% of its attempts, it will FAIL to download the list. And guess what? Failure then requires a complete reboot of either the printer, or the PC, or occasionally both.

So in the end, I couldn't be arsed.

Hey, Lexmark? Are you listening? Memory is cheap, in case you hadn't noticed. Download the frigging list ONCE and SAVE it. And then offer an option to refresh the list as and when necessary. Then maybe I'll stand a better chance of decorating my blog, and keep my blood pressure down at the same time.