The upgrade to Mavericks certainly proves that.
I will start off by describing the fun of downloading the software to start the upgrade. It took three times. There was no indication one way or the other what was going on. I had to restart. I finally got the program to start downloading when I was told I need more disk space. I then had to do a safe start up which would free up space. I did that and finally got the upgrade to start.
It took a couple of hours for everything to download. Then you restart and the upgrade started. It took a long time. It was on 20 minutes left for a good half hour. Finally everything was installed.
Everything seems like it was a go. But really no where near it.
I went to the Nats game on Sunday. I took some pictures and I wanted to use those in the story. I plug my iPhone in to the computer. Up pops iPhoto. It says in order to upgrade it need 6 gigs of space to do so. I start trying to figure out where I can free up that much space.
I decided I’ll move my iMovie files. They take up 100 gigs. More than enough space. I go on line to see how to do that. It looks like you just move the program on to an external hard drive. I try that but that’s not it.
I then read you go into iMovie and it will list the drives that you can copy to. You then just hold down the command key and the files will be moved to the new drive. Not only moved to the new drive but deleted from the old one. There are no drives listed in iMovie.
I decide to call Apple. I get an automated voice that actually knows my name (a little creepy). It gets my serial number and what product I’m calling about and sends me to a human. This person I can barely hear. I ask several time for them to speak louder to no avail. I’m then passed on to another person. Who takes the same information about what my problem is and my serial number. I’m then passed on to yet another person.
This guy can actually help me out. He says I have to go into the last version of iMovie to move the files. It makes a certain amount of sense because the two versions of iMovie are two different programs. The movies in folders by years. The problem is you can only move the files in one folder at a time. It takes some time.
I finally get enough space for iPhoto and I upgrade the product. Before I do the upgrade I’m told if I do this the photo files will not work with any previous version of iPhoto. I go ahead and upgrade. It doesn’t take very long.
I now decide to test various programs to see how they work with the new operating system. I started on the Creative Suite. I had problems with all of the programs. I tried InDesign. If I clicked on an actual InDesign file the program had problems opening. I then tried opening the InDesign application itself. That worked better.
My next move was to restart and see what that would do. The seem to make things work better.
Next on the list was to get the printer up and working. I downloaded a new set of drivers. Tried to print something and it wouldn’t work. I got an error message saying the drivers were installed incorrectly. Did I want to fix this. I clicked yes. Everything seemed to be working.
That is until I tried to scan something. That didn’t go so well. In fact it didn’t work at all. I was going to post a Peanuts cartoon. This is what I got.
Sort of like something by Jackson Pollock.
This began my investigation of searching for how to get the scanner to work. Turns out there are many people that have this problem. It looks there might be solution which I might try tonight (I wasted the entire evening on this last night and I actually need to get some things done). I’m still not certain it will work.
A whole lot of hoops to jump through to get the OS and everything associated with it up and working. Not like the old days of Apple when you got a disk and an hour or so later everything was loaded and working. I can only recall a couple of programs that wouldn’t work when I upgraded the OS in the past. And most of the time you knew what would have a problem before hand. Never occurred to me that there would be no drivers to make your scanner work properly. This is an HP product not some strange exotic brand.
I have to say I’m disappointed with Apple and HP on this. Next time I just might not upgrade at all.
2 comments:
I didn't have any problems with Mavericks, or with Creative Suite (because I'm on Creative Cloud, I'm always completely up to date).
However, my Microtek scanner stopped working several years ago after an earlier OS upgrade (Leopard, I think) because Microtek had decided it would no longer issue upgrades to the drivers, so that was that. To use it, I used to fire up the Windows partition on my Mac and scan there.
Now, however, we have an all-in-one colour laser printer with scanner/copier and I scan things and email them to myself. Scanner drivers are now irrelevant, and printer drivers are far easier to come by (and often don't don't change, anyway).
The truth is, though, that I haven't needed to scan anything for years, apart from the odd document needed for something, so I certainly don't miss having a scanner on my desk.
Well I'm glad for you that you don't have that problem. The scanner I have is part of a all-in-one printer with scanner and copier. And the scanner doesn't work at all. The printer works just fine.
I'm not the only one with this problem. You can follow this link http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Scanning-Faxing-and-Copying/Problems-scanning-with-HP-printer-and-Mavericks/td-p/3011019/page/9 to an HP discussion board with 19 pages of questions from people on how to solve this problem.
Bottom line is that neither Apple or HP seem to be very forth coming with help for people. I followed the recommendations on drivers which I read would solve the problem and still the scanner doesn't work.
Thankfully I found you can use the Preview app to scan with. Not much of a program but it gets the job done.
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