Benz Blog

I have a Canon i860 printer and a Canon LiDE 50 scanner. The printer was originally hooked up to my Dell, but when I tried to print to it from the Mac, nothing would happen. No error messages on either machine. Nothing. So I decided to hook it up to the Mac. Installing it was easy and now I can print just fine from the Mac, but after turning on Printer Sharing, I can connect to it from my PC but I get the exact same problem when trying to print to it.

The scanner is another story. First let me comment on how bad the software is for this thing on the Windows side. The install process involved several different types of installers, each with their own quirks, and then when you finally get all the crap installed, there is no facility for viewing freshly scanned images. Instead, you get an error that the external application is not “linked” properly (or something to that effect). Then I try to link it to ACDSee’s viewer but it causes the viewer to crash on startup.

Now on the Mac side, the problems continue. I first try to download the latest driver thinking that would make more sense than trying to install from the CD I had, which was already a few months old. Running the install, however, results in 3 different nasty looking error messages complaining about permissions or something, and then I get a window that says: “Driver Installation was Successful”. Yeah right. Nice coding, idiots!

So I proceed to try and install the software from the CD that came with the scanner. First, I was amazed at how stupid things are organized on the disk. You would think there would be a single setup program, or at least some clue as to what to click on without having to read anything. Nada. This is what it looks like:

Edit: sorry – image no longer available

I go on to figure out that the program I want to install first is the CanoScan Toolbox, so I go ahead and double click that program and wham: Error creating file. 1008:5,-5000 Access denied error. I fire up the Disk Utility program and repair the file permissions on the disk. Turns out there were pretty screwed up! (HOW they got this way I have no idea). This allows the setup program to get a bit further, but I quickly get the same error again. So now I’ve sent an e-mail to Canon. This should prove to be a barrel of laughs.