Sunday, October 4, 2009

Brother printer setup nightmare

For the last few years I have been recommending Brother laser printers, based on the reports of owners rather than personal experience. When my Apple LW 630 became obsolete due to the end of AppleTalk in Snow Leopard, I decided to take my own advice and went to Fry's to get one.

They had two models in the 2100 series: USB-only and USB/Ethernet/Wireless. I got the wireless one for $149 (same cost as at Staples) and then set about on a nightmare of phone calls and retries with their tech support.

First the "wizard" failed. It installed the drivers, but was not able to connect to the wireless router. It worked with USB, but I found out that, unlike most every printer on the market, it did not work with USB hubs, powered or unpowered. I don't have enough ports on my MacBook Pro to permanently dedicate to a printer, and although wired Ethernet was an option, I wanted to be able to print from anywhere in the house.

Call #1 to their tech support, the only number available, led to a 19-minute wait and a series of dumb questions from the robot before I got a human. It took another ten minutes for him to determine I had to talk to the Mac specialist. He would transfer me. Was there a direct number to him? He knew of no other number to call and could not transfer me to a supervisor who did.

He switched me to that department, which resulted in a robot that told me that I had called after hours (in reality, they did not close for another half-hour) and left me no transfer or leave-message options. It just hung up. A second attempt, informing the first guy what happened when he transferred me, wound up with the same results. I gave up. Time on phone to accomplish nothing: 1:15.

The next day, after 20 minutes of robot time I got the same place and same results, with the same series of dumb robot questions. The guy transferred me but this time I got someone who at least was there and answered the phone. He had a different series of setup steps from the ones in the documentation but again the same results. No wireless connection but a dozen pages wasted every time I would reset the printer and get the desired page that told me the connection had failed. It was data on the 3rd page I needed. Was there a way to get only that page? Nope.

He told me to double-check what kind of security I had on the wireless router (WPA2) and try again. He emailed me a link to the document that outlined the same set of steps we had tried. Twice more I tried and both times I failed; it would not connect to the router.

The 3rd or 4th callback led to them kicking me upstairs to a "product specialist" who would call me back. He did not call that day. Could I be simply transferred to him? No, they had to send in my request via internal email.

He called the next morning, Thursday (I had started this process on Monday) and I told him the history and we tried again. I told him, screw it, what would happen if I just gave up and unsecured my wifi connection? Go ahead, he said. Another eight test pages later it finally worked! It was never able to store and use the network password, but it was able to successfully establish a connection to the router and has worked ever since. If I want security now I simply have to turn off the router when I am not using it.

If I had been billing myself for the time invested in this setup it would have been over $300 for a $149 printer. I will no longer be recommending this series of Brother printers without including this warning.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey, really wonderful blog and helpful resource about the "Brother printer setup nightmare " Want to read more from you..Congrats!!!

Visit site Brother Printer Technical Support

Unknown said...

Intersting and beautiful blog lovely presentation thanks for sharing your views..
Brother Printer Support