How to ruin a perfectly good Sunday with Windows Vista

TalkBack 1 of 262:

Next »

• Thread View
• Flat View

I'm not a shill

but I will say that I have had wonderful experiences with Canon hardware. I owned an ip6600D that lasted me many years, then I gave it to a friend and purchased an MP970. In both cases, using the vanilla flavored Windows Driver Installation wizard, then directing it to the folder on the CD with XP drivers (it had them for 98SE, 2000, Vista, and OSX as well), the printer, scanner, and card reader all came up under Printers, Imaging Devices, and Disk Drives in Device Manager respectively. Installation took about 90 seconds, and I could choose to install all bundled software, selected titles, or none at all. Additionally, the drivers also install color spaces for Photoshop which greatly add to the accuracy of the things that I print from Photoshop. While the individual ink vs. integrated tri-color cartridge debate will go on for eternity, the Canon 8 series cartridges have some of the lowest cost-per-mL of ink I've seen in recent memory. The Canon machines do cost more, but it is well worth it. While the HP machines are generally good ones, the drivers for them have, for many years, been unnecessarily large, required a lengthy install process, and in many cases have been the root of other issues with the system.

As for the virus issue, two features of Avast that have been lifesavers are that it can be installed in safe mode (MSI installers and many installshield packages cannot), and upon installation you can schedule a boot-time scan, which will scan for and remove viruses before Windows loads. On a badly infected machine, I boot into safe mode w/networking, download/install/update avast, then reboot. Some machines have required passes with Spybot/Adaware thereafter, but in most cases Avast left the system clean enough to boot into normal mode and remove the rest. Also, when removing Symantec products, google the Norton Removal Tool instead of simply uninstalling. the NRT does a more thorough job of removing the Symantec crap, but I'd still recommend a registry scan thereafter to get rid of some of the tentacles still lying around.

Joey

Posted by: voyager529   Posted on: 12/17/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
• The Impact of Virtualization Software on Operating Environments VMware Today's use of virtualization technology allows IT professionals to ... Download Now
• Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Iinfrastructure VMware VMware virtualization software has been adopted by over 120,000 enterprise ... Download Now