Brother MFC7150C Inkjet Printer/FAX/Copier/Scanner

On my Windows machine, I have a Brother MFC7150C Multifunction ``6 in 1'' inkjet printer. It never worked properly under Windows 2000 Professional, but finally it does seem to work properly under Windows XP.

A warning regarding OS upgrades with Brother printers: The Windows 2K driver was months late, and it had severe bugs. Even worse, the updated driver a year or so after that also had bugs! The worst problem was that plain text turned to gibberish after the first page or two, as if the fonts bitmaps are getting clobbered in the printer's memory. However, it must be a software problem since it did not happen under NT. Web pages and graphics-intensive output always seemed to print ok, although the inkjets are almost always a little too dry to give high quality. I have no intention of buying another inkjet printer in the foreseeable future. I greatly prefer laser technology, even if it means giving up color.

Another losing behavior is that received FAXes are usually completely blank because the inkjets are dried up and need to be ``cleaned''. Fortunately, it is possible to configure the machine to retain FAXes in memory so they can be printed out again after cleaning the jets, but this is of course a pain.