Canon MX700

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:

1. Hope that someone else has already set up the printer on the network so you don’t have to figure that part out.
2. 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…)
3. 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)
4. 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)
5. Unplug the USB cable (I know… you just plugged in it. Bear with me)
6. 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)
7. 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?)
8. 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)
9. Log off of your local admin account and log in with your domain account (but only if you want to use email and such)
10. Delete the old local admin account to clear it out
11. Open notepad. Type something in. File – Print. Wait for paper to come out of the printer.
12. Discover that due to the long printer setup time, the ink in the printer has dried out and you need to buy more ink.
13. Cry. Pull an Office Space.
    This post is dedicated to all those who have fought with a printer and lost.