Microsoft's latest Windows 10 updates come with nasty printer bugs
engadget.com
engadget.com
Wasted a ton of toner trying to figure out what was going on. The solution? When adding the printer in Windows, don't add it automatically via network discovery. That will install the bad version of the driver. Manually type in the IP of the printer. That will clue Windows in to using the... correct? version of the driver? The one that doesn't invert all the colors?
Printing is a mess and our industry should be ashamed. How does something like this just break after an update? I can only imagine the absolute spaghetti bowl that is the Windows print subsystem.
Here's an official Brother FAQ outlining the "fix"[0]. I'm pretty sure it's still not fixed in Windows and continues to require this song-and-dance workaround.
[0]: https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/167000/...
I was printing something that I had actually inverted the colors on (a screenshot from Android of my WiFi QR code, where I use the dark theme on the phone, so I inverted it before printing), so I thought that somehow Photoshop had told the printer "this image is inverted, print the original instead" and I spent a while in the Photoshop options looking for some wacky setting that would control that.
Tried printing from Windows Photo Viewer with the same inverted result, despite seeing an image with a white background. Eventually I printed a test page from Notepad and started getting on the right track, but for a while I genuinely thought some color-inversion-but-only-for-display property had become embedded in the image file :)
I have Bose wireless headphones. They used to operate as expected: leave bluetooth on at all times on the laptop. When turning the headphones off, they disconnect. When turning the headphones on, they reconnect.
Eventually there was a Windows update, and this stopped working. Now, if I turn the headphones off, only the microphone will reconnect when I turn them back on. To get sound to play through the headphones, I have to disable and then reenable bluetooth in Windows. Every time.
The Windows side, not so much. The words "Windows Insider" come to mind, but honestly, I have no idea how that works. It doesn't feel like there's a community around it, or if there is, it must be small. If I run into a bug post-update on Windows, I certainly don't feel empowered to pop open a Jira like I do for Minecraft.
I get that it's a different scale and all - but it seems like Microsoft should really put some effort into crowdsourcing their bug reporting if they're not going to invest thoroughly in QA/regression testing for their flagship product.
I mean, I get why you would blame MS for breaking this but maybe the onus is also on Bose and their ridiculously bad driver support.
The headphones are able to connect once after disabling and reenabling bluetooth in Windows. If the problem were that the headphones are configured to use a fixed, predictable long-term key, it isn't obvious to me why Windows would accept that key sometimes, but not all the time.
(Note that I don't need to have Windows forget the device and re-pair from scratch.)
Is there some aspect of initial bluetooth negotiation that would explain this?
> Your Bluetooth device attempted to establish a debug connection. The Windows Bluetooth stack does not allow debug connection while it is not in the debug mode.
I don't see that. What I see is
> A device with Bluetooth adapter address (2c:45:a1:20:a1:99) has a bad service record (attribute identifier 9). The service will not be visible.
That happens several times every time, whether the connection succeeds or not. There is also a message that appears just once, when the connection succeeds:
> Windows cannot store Bluetooth authentication codes (link keys) on the local adapter. Bluetooth keyboards might not work in the system BIOS during startup.
Searching for the first message, I found some support threads from Bose customers. They seem pretty angry about their headphones not working. :/
I assume the bad driver was running in kernal space, is there a reason to design it that way?
Got it working with Google cloud print though.
https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html
via
System updates have been a mostly solved problem since Windows XP (or maybe earlier) and I don't recall updates outright deleting installed software until Windows 10 came out.
Windows 10 obviously uses a different update model (it's essentially a full OS reinstall) but this model should've been developed taking into account the requirements of the old one, and I think "leave installed software/drivers alone" is a very important one.
Releasing a half-baked implementation that is worse than the old one is very sloppy. To the eyes of the user it doesn't matter how "good" the underlying details is (I guess the new model does have some advantages on a technical level), if it wipes out existing software and makes certain peripherals not work it's an overall negative and shouldn't have been released.
I dont think its fair to blame the OS here and in this case you may get a better experience, and maybe security (removing those old HP background processes running with elevated privileges) using microsofts generic postscript printer drivers.
As stated in a previous comment, you're installing drivers for another model of printer. So I find it unreasonable to believe there wont be problems down the line even if they appear to be working.
HP has a Universal Print Driver that will support your printer and be compatible with Windows 10 with out resorting to installing drivers meant for another printer. Not exactly a high prority test case for Microsoft.
That shouldn't be the OS's decision to make. The user wanted his machine to install something, and the something even worked fine after install.
Are you advocating for the OS deleting files/software that it considers "wrong" without explicitly asking the user?
Besides that, the driver appears to be fully compatible because it works fine once reinstalled. It would be one thing if the driver just stopped working (because the printing driver API changed, which is fair enough for a decades-old printer), but in this case it's not about API incompatibility but a broken update system.
> HP has a Universal Print Driver that will support your printer and be compatible with Windows 10
The last time I checked, none of the official driver on the vendor website worked, nor the automatic driver that Windows installed. I mean that would be the obvious first thing people check when their devices don't work... For me using those drivers just printed out an error.
if it can be made for $50-100 i think it would be a great product.
https://kb.ucla.edu/articles/hp-laserjet-1012-and-windows-10
To print in Windows I have a checklist: 1. Print 2. Restart printer 3. Cancel print job, try to print again. 4. Restart print spooler, try to print again. 5. Restart computer, try to print.
Usually works with #4 or #5. Having a family member print is a major tech support undertaking.
At this point, as user, you have usually lost the game. This can mean anything from: "The print job can't be cancelled/deleted." to "The PC will restart that job every time you restart the PC".
Now, the printers themselves have been a cantankerous lot, but Windows' printing generally works fine at home.
You wanna see dragons? Look at the OSX print spooler. Or can someone tell me why my printer always seems to be stuck on pause??
Also compared to try to do duplex printing under linux, windows is easy.
We got a month ago new printer in our company. Now we just print, walk to any printer in the company and login with the card. Now we have to choose our printer job and we could change from color to bw. But we can't change the paper size.
The cheap ones just have some tiny microprocessor that knows how to read the proprietary bitmap sent from the computer, and rely on the host PC for font rendering etc.
(Rendering fonts and vectors from a PDF can get pretty expensive!)
Besides, Postscript can be arbitrarily complex, and with modern PCs, PDFs may be similarly complex. Much easier to deal with that (both bugs and memory costs) in a driver which can be upgraded easily, rather than in firmware.
Way back when, in the early days of laser printers, the computer wouldn't be able to keep up with the printer, and a decent printer had a faster CPU than the computer it was attached to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter#Hardware - 12MHz CPU in the printer, attached to an 8MHz CPU in the Mac.
IPP is standard in (most?) linux, and Airprint is basically IPP+Avahi+some proprietary-bits.
Since Action Pack is a subscription, what happens to the licenses when you stop paying?
After ending the subscription there was a one year grace period to either obtain new license, renew subscription or remove the software. In BizSpark you got to keep the licenses, apart from MSDN subscription of course.
If you're not particularly concerned about licensing though, just pirate it.
I don't like it, but it's not too hard to do either.
Just get Enterprise or Education (which if you know a kid with a Office 365 acccount from their school, they can log into Azure and get a MSDN key for free[0]), and run ShutUp 10 to kill the telemetry. Or just set the three to four GPOs. Done.
you can install the microsoft store later. also, since WSL distros are appx files, you can sideload them even without the store installed.
>no updates to system applications
not sure what you mean by this. what is there to update?
The Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) is designed for Windows 10 devices and use cases where the key requirement is that functionality and features don’t change over time.
What?? Is there a requirement scenario where this is NOT true? I don't buy and set up my OS/computers just so things break randomly because of forced updates.
Why do companies do this? Why is avoiding breaking updates considered a hipster/contrarian/rebellious thing?
[0]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/l...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...
> Affected platforms: ... Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019; ... Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2015; Windows 8.1
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the need for QAs to test as well.
At the very least there is a completely different psychology required in testing, where the goal is to break things, but when you are the person who has created that thing there is sub conscious resistance to breaking things too much.
Definitely this. I'm primarily a developer, but while I can do a good job of QA on someone else's code, I find it almost impossible to do a thorough job on my own.
1) Testing my own code is boring. I keep thinking about what it should do and then taking shortcuts where I don't test every possible circumstance because I believe I can infer what will happen in one case from another.
2) Testing my own code is time I'm not spending working on the next bit of code in my queue. At a certain point I start feeling like I should just be working on the next thing
Programmers should be required to do enough local testing to not break the build of course, but the same person who wrote the code can't also thoroughly test it, because they'll inevitably only test the "happy path", even if they don't intend to.
Is the cost savings worth it? For Microsoft, I don't know. It depends on how much brand damage they make with this. Apple has its own desktop OS value destruction process, and Google is killing off Cloud Print for its desktop OS, and replacing it with hope and dreams (hope and dreams only available if your chrome device still gets updates, but the windows cloud print server is already gone from windows chrome)
It's also nice to have the option of booting into a pre-configured USB drive with a persistent Linux environment you know will work because it's a time capsule. [It's the pre-configuring part that's a pain, but it can be worth it; do a dd copy to another identical stick once you've got it tuned up and you always have a failsafe.]
The solution was to set it as the default printer, then add a new printer with the same CUPS URL. For some reason, setting it as the default allowed Windows to see it again. Then delete the new copy, and the original began working and allowed its settings to be edited. Incredibly frustrating.
The file format is likely called ZPL ("Zebra Print Language") and you can actually use LPR to send the data - the raw label data - directly to the printer. Use `lpr -o raw`.
If you google for "lpr print zebra zpl" you can find more specific guides, such as https://www.easypost.com/how-to-print-zpl-labels-from-the-co...