Well sooner or later some hardware has to be upgraded. I got some stuff I really like.
\nNew Laptop
\nSince Mandy is off to college at MSU – and she called me and mentioned that her laptop needed reformatting (again) since it was slowing down – I splurged on a new MacBook from the Michigan Computer Showcase. It was a great price – $1299 – including 2GB RAM and 3 years of Apple Care – and a free (with rebate) iPod touch. Someone will the the touch as a gift probably. I also bought two licenses at faculty price of WIndows Vista – I will try to avoid giving Mandy Vista (shhh don’t tell her) as long as possible – not that I don’t like Vista – I actually really like a VIsta a lot – I just want a mono-culture of operating systems. This frees up Mandy’s AMD based laptop – I might end up with my own PC laptop out of the deal after things shake out and I give myself Brent’s laptop.
\nNew Printer(s)
\nI finally retired the LaserJet4 printer – it was a workhorse – but it did not have a power save mode and it just bothered me to be paying to both heat and cool the house all summer long.
\nI almost went and got an HP Color Laser – HP makes a nice one for about $400 – but this time – I did not rush – and I googled – before the purchase (instead of after the purchase) – it turns out that the color cartridges need replacing even if all you do is print black and white – sorry HP – that does not compute for me.
\nSo my next printer choice was the Brother 2170w – for a little over $100 you get a fast compact B\/W laser printer – with wireless and wired networking – and from my previous Brother experience – I knew that I loved their approach to strong mac support and Vista support.
\nI decided to buy it on Amazon because I missed the sale at Office Max – and the printers were $80.00 – I figured – Heck! That is about the cost of a toner cartridge – so I bought two so the kids have their own printer – and when one toner runs out – we have a whole spare printer! I worried a bit about having three Brother printers on the same network – but figured Brother had that figured out.
\nI was going to wire the printers instead of wireless – but once I experimented with wireless – I skipped the wires. Here is the pattern – you connect the printer to the network – install the drivers. You can reconfigure the printer using the BRAdmin lite software (Windows only – good to have Vista dual booted on the family mac). It scans the LAN and finds the printers – and you can tell them to become wireless printers. I have a nice Airport Express with security on the second floor – so they get strong \/ fast signal. You give the WEP password – viola! You have a wireless printer.
\nAll the printer drivers – I installed as Ethernet – not wireless – after all the printers just have IP addresses.
\nOn the Mac you just add a printer – when there are multiple printers the list of printers (Bonjour) appends the Mac address to the printer name – so you can figure out which one you are talking to. On Windows – the add printer did not work to find the printers on wireless so well – so I used BRadmin to find the printers and then just told Windows to look at the right IP address – from that point forward printer install was trivial and obvious.
\nI ended up putting both printers on wireless – since it is so dang fast and so seldom used – it is just two less wires tangling under our feet. And the printers can go anywhere there is a power plug – very nice.
\nSo now we have three networked Brother printers – inkjet and two lasers all on the network and working on all my operating systems in the house.
\nSummary
\nThis felt really good – my goal as CTO of the home is to keep tech support calls o a minimum – my approach is to fix problems before they occur – things like two internet connections (cable modem and DSL) and an auto-failover router. I have just learned over time that network attached printers are the only way to go – and that you need a lot of printers – because they will fail at the weirdest time – sometimes it is technical and sometimes it is supplies. But in all cases – I am far away from home – it is 12:30AM and there is a major homework project due tomorrow morning.
\nMoving toward an all-Mac computing environment and everyone either having an iPhone or iPod – also makes things nice – iTunes libraries work well and share well (with Apple TV too) – and we have lots of charger cables for iPods and iPhones laying around the house.
\nSo this time next year when Brent graduates from High School – there will likely be one more Mac laptop purchased. After that I will simply have to get another more iMac that dual boots in the basement – and I will be 100% mac hardware in the home.
\nVista and XP will be present where folk need them – but as I pointed out in a blog post – Mac seems to support Vista and XP better than most PC-only hardware vendors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well sooner or later some hardware has to be upgraded. I got some stuff I really like. New Laptop Since Mandy is off to college at MSU – and she called me and mentioned that her laptop needed reformatting (again) since it was slowing down – I splurged on a new MacBook from the Michigan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2657,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536\/revisions\/2657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}