Why You Should Never Buy a Canon Printer
This past Christmas (2002), my wife and I received a Canon MultiPass C755 printer/fax/scanner/copier/etc. as a gift. Overjoyed at the machine's great functionality, we hooked it right up to her Windows XP-based machine, shared it across our LAN, and had both her machine and my Windows 98 box printing happily away.
Several months later, her machine did as only Windows can do -- it died with no apparent explanation, requiring us to use HP's non-destructive restore tool to bring it back to life. One of the consequences here was that we had to reinstall the printer driver. After we'd done so, we found that we could no longer print across the LAN. When I called Canon's customer support, I was told that they didn't support sharing the printer across a LAN under XP.
As I'd already done this without problems before, I didn't believe the customer support representative. I e-mailed tech support, and much to my chagrin, traded a series of e-mails with them wherein they stated that not only did they not support this, but that it wasn't possible, and they wouldn't give me a technical explanation of why it wasn't possible.
In order to warn others who might spend good money on such a worthless piece of hardware as this, or might inaverdently believe they are going to get customer support out of Canon, I'm making my communications with them available here. I admit to having been nasty with customer support during these mails, but sometimes life is so frustrating, you need to let it out.
Entire conversation in one message
My question to tech support
Canon's initial reply
My (rather infuriated) response
Canon's escalation of the issue
Canon's initial claim of impossibility
My response, citing my having already done the "impossible"
Canon's continuing denial
My request for an explanation
Canon's refusal to explain
My final response, notice of intent to publish