CMS Author MikeRivers Posted March 13, 2009 CMS Author Share Posted March 13, 2009 Actually, we had a thread here about a month ago regarding laser printers, and the SSS community had excellent experiences with Brother. I have a Brother laser printer. I got it when it would have cost me nearly $50 for a new set of cartridges for my Epson ink jet printer and Staples had a Brother on sale for $100 that had a network interface so I could print to it from any computer in the house. I'm still on the "introductory" toner cartridge, but then I don't do a lot of printing. When I have to buy a new toner cartridge (about $70), I'll think hard about relacing the printer . . . and there goes the county landfill. My last Epson 24-pin printer used $5 ribbons and I used it for more than ten years. I only gave it up for the ink jet because the ink jet was thrown in with a computer deal, and I thought it might be useful to be able to print in color now and then. I think I printed maybe 10 pages in color. I think Apple removing FW from several of their machines really startled people. The wild card is USB 3.0, and whether that gets out of the gate faster than FW800. I see people asking frequently about what audio interfaces work with the Firewire 800 port on their computer. I never even heard of USB3.0 before this discussion. Firewire 800 is already out of the gate. Whether it will make it through the first lap remains to be seen, though. I was fortunate enough to sit in with a design team designing a new audio interface. They had always been into FireWire but a lot of the team questioned whether continuing to do so was a good decision or not. So did they? Or did they put the project on hold to see what was going to come next and when? The problem with Firewire on Windows is that there's no standard driver that everyone can use, so it's never going to be plug-and-play. The problem with Firewire on MacOS is that the hardware support for Firewire is going away on the most popular computers. The problem with Firewire on Linux is that there isn't enough of it. So I can see why it's on the way out, but it's the same old story. When something needs upgrading, you can't just upgrade the part that needs upgrading, you have to upgrade everything. Bah! Humbug! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CMS Author MikeRivers Posted March 13, 2009 CMS Author Share Posted March 13, 2009 I'm sure you'll be able to get FireWire cards for some time to come...I still see adapters for parallel ports and SCSI. Just because a company WANTS you to upgrade doesn't always mean you HAVE to. They can make it mighty inconvenient. By the time I replaced my studio computer a few months back, I had to take the Firewire card out of the old one because my friendly local computer store only had PCI-E Firewire cards for too much money. Sure, I could order a PCI one on line for $20, and pay $10 shipping for it, but you know how I feel about that. When the Mackie Onyx Firewire card showed up, the most powerful computer that I had was a Dell laptop, so I thought I'd set that up to use with the mixer. I bought a PCMCIA Firewire adapter which, once I de-clicked the computer with a new NIC driver, worked fine with the mixer, but I could never get it to work with a disk drive - any disk drive, drives that would work with the Firewire port on computers that I visited with them. Dell eventually told me that the PCMCIA card slot wasn't fast enough for a disk drive. So eventually, I replaced the computer (but I'm still using the old PCMCIA Firewire adapter. I'm glad I'm no longer using analog tape on a regular basis, but I feel better about buying a reel of tape now that will last 50 years (since it's already obsolete) than a new piece of computer hardware that will be obsolete in two years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CMS Author MikeRivers Posted March 13, 2009 CMS Author Share Posted March 13, 2009 Take my ancient Epson 1240U scanner: No 64-bit Vista support. That is, until I looked around the net. Someone hacked the 32-bit driver/applet, changed (apparently) just a couple variables in a couple lines of code, and voila - 64-bit support Where are the people who can do that and why aren't they working on audio hardware? Not that I, personally, need it yet, but I was getting really tired of seeing people asking on the Mackie forum when there would be Vista drivers for their hardware that they had to stop using when they got a new computer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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