Microsoft making vendors remove drivers

Jim Thompson wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

yes,I did,but the drivers are only for W98-SE and WindowsME;they are lumped together on the errata sheet,mentioned as a single selection.

W98-1st didnt have any real USB support,either,so the printer wouldn't work with W98 1st edition.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." (Hanlon's Razor)

I don't know why that particular driver disappered. However, I have had dealings with Lexmark over the years and found that every time they re-organize their site, some things manage to disappear. I've had lousy results reporting the problem via their support people or email. However, when I laundered the problem though one of their major VAR's, the problems were instantly fixed.

Sure, but are you _SURE_ that it was Microsoft that precipitated the driver removal, and not some Lexmark management idiot that seems to believe that killing the old products will somehow enhance the sales of current products.

Incidentally, Lexmark is not the only company that might believe that removing old information sells new products. Omron sells blood pressure monitors. As soon as a new model appears, all the data sheets, manuals, and service notices magically disappear from their web pile.

Also, there are various web sites that specialize in hard to find drivers. Unlike the referal sites, these actually archive the drivers. I like to use: (registration required) Sorry, but nothing listed for the Lexmark X1240. There is one posting in the forums looking for the W98 driver. Someone responded that it was missing since June 2007, when it officially became unsupported.

Thanks! I had misplaced my HEM-711 manual.

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

Nice resource but JEEZ do they go berserk with the "special offers"!

Jeff Liebermann wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I've searched many archive sites already. I have a post on comp.peripherals.printers inquiring about X1240 W98SE drivers. So far,replies have only pointed to the newer driver package lacking W98/ME drivers.

Well, you could buy a spare which presumably includes the original driver CD:

etc... Think of it as buying a spare set of ink carts as the ink is worth more than the printer.

The printer looks vaguely familiar. I think I tossed (recycled) one recently. I usually keep the CD's. I'll look Monday.

Note that this printer is identical to the Dell A-920 printer. However, Dell only supplied W2K and XP drivers, and never released any W95/98/ME drivers.

Personally, methinks putting time and money into this printer is a bad investment. It's slow, old, uses expensive cartridges, and lacks the quality of the current flavor of inks. I also have a really bad attitude about Lexmark due to their use of non-refillable ink cartridges on some models and therefore try to avoid their products.

Whether the removal of the driver from the Lexmark web site was precipitated by Microsoft has (IMHO) not been established.

One of my friends ran into an interesting problem. His company sells PC hardware which includes drivers. His driver collection goes back to Windoze 3.1. There are some known bugs in his Windoze 98SE/ME drivers that would be considered ummmm... disgusting. He fixed the problem, produced a new driver, but the company attorney is hinting that publicly making the fixed driver available would be a bad idea. That would imply the company is continuing development on obsolete products, which may be perceived as a lifetime extension of the original warranty. Methinks it's a logical stretch, but management doesn't want to take any chances. So, the fixed driver is only available by special request and the broken 98SE/ME driver was removed from the web pile to avoid trashing any more computers. When a supported customers calls for the driver, they quietly get the fixed version. This might be what's happening with Lexmark.

Incidentally, in the process and machine control biz, there are a substantial number of boxes quietly running antique operating systems. I recently repaired an NC controller that would only run on a 386DX-40 style motherboard running MS DOS 3.3(?). Similarly, I blundered into a telephone switch that was being administered by a Windoze 3.1 box, and a CDR (call detail recorder) for a PBX running IBM Xenix.

Oops, I goofed. Something has changed. About 3 months ago, I complained that only the current model PDF manuals were on the web pile. At the time, the site listed perhaps 5 assorted products. I called with a calibration issue used the oportunity to complain about the lack of manuals. I also did the same via their email form. I guess they fixed it as manuals for my older devices are now available online. My appologies for not double-checking before accusing.

Incidentally, I have 3 assorted Omron BP measuring devices. HEM-775 and some others I keep in the office. They all read about 10-20 mm Hg higher than when taking my BP manually. That's well outside the

Omron, my cardiologist, and various medical instrument designers have not been able to figure out why. I've almost given up on the computerized BP meters and gone back to doing it manually.

Move all those pictures of naked women to another room, or check your blood pressure somewhere else. ;-)

My HEM-711 measures always within a few points of the doctor's.

...Jim Thompson

And to think, that electronic CAD packages, including SPICE itself IIRC, originated on *nix platforms.

Your experiences with various M$ OS products is very different than mine. I found MSwin 3.1 to be a fine reasonably stable product. I had it running for weeks nonstop.

M$Win95 however i could not get to boot as often as not. Totally flaky. Never got it to run more that a day or so at a crack

Did not use any NT though.

MSWin98 was alright though. I still have running on older machines that will not run XP.

Moved to XP for my first dual CPU unit. I liked the faster boot times.

Of course i have been Linuxing since the early W98 days as well. WINE is so good now that i can run almost all of my legacy applications now. Just a few more really old ones and one new one and i will be able to sell off my excess XP licence/install media, new and sealed original factory packaging.

I don't recall Xenix ever being owned by IBM. They already had AIX and a direct AT&T unix licence.

I do not think that is a more elegant solution. Just better able to get the job done at some cost in performance.

I just fix computers. I don't use them.

That's actually fairly accurate. In the repair biz, I only see broken computers. I'm sure that there are users and systems out there that work the first time, are totally stable, and do all the right things. It's just that I don't see any of these. What I see are the one's that don't work.

That also applies to customers. You are apparently knowledgeable in the art of keeping a computer alive. You wouldn't do something dumb, like simultaneously install several virus scanners (a common practice incidentally). You probably put some effort into keeping your machines fairly well organized and free of junkware.

Well, that's not what I see. I get customers that are lacking in either the time or patience to deal with such mundane tasks. That's fine, as I will gladly separate them from their money and do it for them. It's easy enough.

I accidentally found something interesting about Windoze 3.1. While doing battle with Windoze 95, the speed and memory capacity of the motherboards had increased substantially. For fun, I setup Windoze

Another anecdote from the time was my customer from hell. I'll spare you the details. She constantly complained that her Windoze 3.1 machine was crashing. My office machine was similar and totally stable, so I just traded machines. I found no problems using her machine in my office, but she continued to see stability problems with my known good machine. I don't know what she was doing to cause problem. Maybe her computer is situated over a tiny black hole that sucks in bits. Dunno.

I didn't have much of a problem with the operating system. I was about the same quality as Windoze 3.1 with the same issues. The problems I had all revolved around newly minted applications and ported Windoze 3.1 code. More often than not, the application would crash the operating system, which sorta hints that the operating system is not going a very good job of defending itself.

I did. NT3.5 and NT4.0. I just killed off a customers NT4 servers (PII/450) that had been running continuously and reliably for perhaps

Methinks Win98SE (second edition) was the best of the bunch. When W2K came out, MS tried to stop Win98SE development. That didn't work because W2K wasn't really ready, so they rushed out WinME as an interim solution. Incidentally, the timing is why it's impossible to do an in-place upgrade from WinME to W2K. Anyway, WinME was a patch job of bug fixes, half implemented features, and new bugs. I managed to get it stable by disabling many of the half implemented features (i.e. system restore) that were causing problems. It's ok, but methinks Win98SE is slightly better.

It won't last. Ever notice that XP takes more and more time to boot as it gets older? I've been forced into doing some rather painful reinstalls from scratch (usually on a new hard disk) to recover. None of the speed improvement and registry cleanup utilities have done anything beyond minor improvements.

I have a machine in the office setup to dual boot W2K and XP. It spends most of its life running XP. I use it to demonstrate the speed difference between W2K and XP. For system level operations (copying files, scanning for viruses, burning DVD's) the speed is about the same. However, for CPU and memory intensive tasks (CAD, spreadsheet benchmarks, rendering, batch photo edits), W2K is about twice as fast. I have a similar dual boot setup for comparing Vista and XP, but unfortunately have not done much in the way of benchmarking. My general impression is that XP is considerably faster than Vista for just about everything, but don't have any numbers yet.

Sigh. I maintain a few Linux systems. They're all servers, not desktops. I have a Compaq P4 2.4Ghz box where I install various Linux desktop mutations, with the intention of it eventually becoming my main desktop. However, since there's no revenue generated in this exercise, the box just sits there, doing nothing most of the time. By the time I find time to work on it, the next release is out and I have to start over. Incidentally, my main machine and mail server is a

Incidentally, I had an odd thing happen on eBay yesterday. I needed some Compaq laptop Windoze XP installation media. I found what I wanted on eBay and submitted a bit. A bit later, I received an email from eBay informing me that the auction had been withdrawn by eBay apparently due to some kind of policy violation. I've bought such recovery CD's on eBay in the past, so this is something new (to me). Apparently, Microsoft is getting a bit more aggressive in its campaign to kill off XP.

Everything can be traced back to its Unix origins:

History of CAD:

Most early CAD was on DEC iron. My first CAD system was using an Applicon CAD system running RSX-11 on a PDP-11/34 in about 1981.

One time I was testing an in-house program and it would crash hard every time I selected a block of text with a mouse left click and hold/drag. Never when the developer tried it, always when I did. He suspected that it was a configuration difference, so I walked over to his PC, selected a block of text, and crashed the program. Rather amazed, he went over to my PC and selected a block of text without crshing it. Then I tried and it crashed as usual.

(Feel free to stop reading now and guess why) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

He starting at the top left corner to create the the selection box, while I was starting from the bottom right corner. :(

Use XXCopy, Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image to save a snapshot of a fresh install. It's the Universal Windows Repair Method.

I wasn't. At the time, Xenix was owned by Microsoft. Xenix is based on AT&T Unix System 7, which Microsoft licensed from AT&T in 1979. SCO licensed Xenix from Microsoft and later bought it outright.

IBM also licensed both the AT&T System 7 code and the Xenix port from Microsoft at some point. IBM ported it to the original IBM PC/AT (286AT). At the time SCO was selling "SCO Xenix 2.0" which was much better.

AIX came much later.

Note that Microsoft was working on Xenix *BEFORE* they started work on PCDOS. In 1981, they apparently tried to sell Xenix to IBM for the original IBM PC. IBM was worried about what might happen to to Unix like product after the AT&T breakup and gracelessly declined.

Lots of detail here:

Heh. To a man with only a hammer everything looks like a nail. Here's the page without graphics: