Brother laser printer tech support

One of the problems I had in moving to the mac is that my Brother HL-1670N laser printer would fail to print more often than not from OS/X. It would display "Ignore Data" on the LCD, and then not print anything. If I turned on postscript error reporting, it would complain about an offending "restoredict" command.

Turns out that it's a problem with the firmware, and the printer needs to be replaced with one with newer firmware, as reported on this posting at apple.

I called Brother tech support (1-800-276-7746), they readily confirmed the problem, and are FedExing a replacement printer to me. I'll swap the old one for the new one, send the old one back via a prepaid airbill, and off I go with the problem solved (hopefully).

I want to commend Brother for having such superior customer support. This is exactly how manufacturers should handle problems like this, if they can't provide a software patch. HIGHLY recommended.

Switching

So, I've had the new powerbook for a few days now. It hasn't dominated my life, but it's been a pleasant experience so far.

VirtualPC is god-awful slow. Installing Visual Studio.NET 2003, the MSDN docs, and Visio took almost 8 hours. IntelliJ seems to be a bit snappier... :-)

More news as we go.

Just finished Halo - Combat Evolved

Yowza. Damn good thing too, since I've got work to do. What a ride...

This game made the X-Box a platform to reckon with, and now it's finally out for the pc and the mac. Buying Bungie is one of the best purchases Micro$oft has ever made.

I've loved the Bungie guys' stuff ever since Marathon I for the mac back in the early 90's. This is their best yet. It has some tie-ins to the Marathon storyline, but stands on its own.

New powerbook on the way

OK - two weeks ago, the 'OS 10.2' badge went away on the store.apple.com site. My new 17" powerbook should be here tomorrow. Hee hee hee!

Now, the only trick will be figuring out what bag to get. I've been looking at the Spire Volt XL, and the Tom Bihn Smart Alec. Leaning towards the smart alec, we'll see what happens...