XP-Replacement for Parents

[James Laver]

On 27 Mar 2014, at 23:42, Wendy G.A. van Dijk <nl.pm at wendy.org> wrote:

> Scanners....  I never had luck with scanner support on Windows XP, always stupid errors.  This behaviour of idiots working on drivers at the scanner manufacturers is continued for support in Ubuntu.  It just sucks always.  Almost none of the extended options promised, ever work for me.  Not back than in XP, and not now in Ubuntu.  I just have to scan my shit to a USB stick, and copy the files to my computer later.  Universal law of conservation of suckdom.

(slightly OT…)

Scanners and printers are the source of most of my historical frustrations with computers.

I’ve finally achieved hardware peripheral nirvana by buying a Scansnap S220m (sheet-fed) and a cheap lexmark laser and plugging them into my mac, whereupon scanning becomes “launch scansnap software, hit button on front of scanner” and printing just works. Before this, I more or less gave up because I’ve never had much luck. The part where software has to touch the real world is where it all goes wrong.

James