[red-beard]

More on my story, and why I hate "help desks". The first guy I talked to at Dell, in the printer group, told me that if I installed the printer onto a network, then installed XP drivers on XP machines in the network, that I would never be able to load x64 drivers onto a Win 7 machine and make it work. HUH? No software is loaded onto the printer from the XP mahines, why should there be any connection? I told him he didn't know what he was talking about and to get me to a supervisior. When I asked him his employee ID, he hung up!

Tech number 2 ended up consulting with his supervisor and told me that the printer and Win7 were not compatible. He sent me to customer service, so I could return the printer. If I was going to return something as "not compatible", it was going to be the laptop

Customer service was not very helpful, but at least she transferred me to a better tech.

Tech #3 said he couldn't help, but he would tranfer me to the "software" group.

While I was being transferred around, I decided to look at the windows Vista x64 drivers. Interesting, there was an updated drive on Oct 29th. I downloaded that one and started to read the "readme.txt" notes.

Tech #4 comes on the line, I explain everything and he points me to a "later" driver. I had already downloaded that one, and it is a driver for the scanner function. I tell him this and he reads the notes and agrees. I tell him I think I've found the correct driver and ask him to verify it. He reads the notes and says that it the correct one.

End of the story, the printer and fax-printer drivers work and I can print from my laptop. It is turning into a nice machine.

Techs 1 & 2 and their Supervisor are Pwned by me.

Other Win 7 oberservations: Adobe Acrobat 9 doesn't work with Explorer 64. It does work with Explorer regular (32). You need to look for the x64 version of whatever software you're running, since the 32 bit version doesn't always work (Symantec Endpoint, but they have a x64 version!).