It’s a fancy looking printer. Scanning, Faxing, Printing, built-in networking. But it is quite the difficult device to set up. For anyone else who is interested, here is the process:
- Hope that someone else has already set up the printer on the network so you don’t have to figure that part out.
- Create a local administrator account on your laptop, then login with that account (a domain account with local admin permissions is not enough for some strange reason…)
- Download the canon driver from the internet and install (I think It’s something like a 3.4GB download, which is about average for printers nowadays)
- Plug in the USB cable, wait for driver install to finish (better not do this before installing the driver, because the out-of-the-box windows plug-and-play drivers won’t work)
- Unplug the USB cable (I know… you just plugged in it. Bear with me)
- Delete the canon printer and fax that now appear in your printers list (I guess you can leave them if you don’t mind sharing a USB cable with everyone else)
- Install the printer drivers again, this time with the network option instead of the USB option (why couldn’t I do this in the first place?)
- Go to the printers list and delete the fax device that was added (unless you like having a long list of useless items in your printer list)
- Log off of your local admin account and log in with your domain account (but only if you want to use email and such)
- Delete the old local admin account to clear it out
- Open notepad. Type something in. File – Print. Wait for paper to come out of the printer.
- Discover that due to the long printer setup time, the ink in the printer has dried out and you need to buy more ink.
- Cry. Pull an Office Space.
This post is dedicated to all those who have fought with a printer and lost.