Imac woes

Some of you, actually ALL of the people I know actually ready this blog, know that we recently purchased an imac. Partly this is because I was fed up with Windows, partly this was because I read some pretty persuasive statistics on the overall cost of ownership of a Mac vs a PC, partly this was a fear of Vista, and partly, if not largely, this was because with a 12 year-old who knows she knows everything and thus won’t download malicious software, I wanted the most malicious software resistant machine I could get. Up until now the machine has been VERY impressive and easy to use. However….

Over the weekend, I took the fairly innocuous step of trying to install a four year old laser printer. Silly me. I checked and HP had a Mac OS X driver for the printer, a Laserjet 1300. I down loaded the driver and plugged in the printer. I had a USB to Parallel cord because I did not realize that the Printer had a USB in connection; I had been using it parallel. I ran the install, the instructions for which were archaic. I say that because they told me how to create a Print queue using a utility that does not even seem to be in Leopard. However, Leopard automatically made the queue for me so that was no problem. So far, so good… I think.

I opened the TextView program which is the default program for txt files. After all, it doesn’t get any simpler than a txt file right? I loaded in a short txt file (one of my email sig files) and hit print. And waited. And waited some more. And hit the button on the printer to generate a test page which immediately printed. And opened the queue to see my document sitting there, in the que. And theorized that maybe the problem was that, for some reason, it didn’t like the USB to parallel conversion. Resolved to get a USB-USB cord today and try that. Went to bed after the Packers lost.

This morning I came down to find the txt file had printed sometime since I had surrendered the computer to my fiancée to watch the Giants-Packers game. Odd. I booted Word and printed a document which came out immediately. I booted Firefox and tried to print my homepage. Nothing. I went upstairs to get a cup of coffee, and by the time I came down, voila the web page had printed. I booted TextView and tried to print the sig file again. Nothing. At this point I don’t know if I have a conversion issue, a driver issue, a Leopard issue, or what. Arrrgh!

Then there is the OTHER problem and it is definitely Leopard’s problem. Starting about the time I installed the printer driver, the computer stopped coming out of sleep mode. It goes into sleep automatically just fine. It used to come out when you hit a key. It’s supposed to come out if you hit a key or the power button. Now though, once it goes to sleep it stays there, period. It will not respond to the keyboard or the on/off button AT ALL; it just sits there dark. At first I thought it was a faulty on/off switch. You have to cut the power to shut it off and re-boot before it will come up again. Now I’m used to PC’s failing to come out of sleep, but with them you can hold down the power button to force a power off. Not so with a Mac. It is a VERY annoying problem and at this point, I have turned off its sleep function. This is not an ideal solution. Arrrgh again!