The Brother laser printer I bought 12 years ago no longer works. Well, that’s not entirely accurate.
The Brother laser printer I bought 12 years ago doesn’t have drivers that work with anything after Windows XP, and I no longer have any machines running Windows XP.
This presents me with an opportunity. You see, I discovered this site about real-world disaster preparedness sometime in 2006, and I’m a big fan of the idea that you should scan everything. Data space is cheap, so why not?
Well, this leads to rather large piles of documents to be scanned. For a while, I had a flat-bed scanner–but that was tedious and it, too, is no longer supported.
What I want is a sort of scaled-down version of this. We have those at work, and they’re awesome. I want something that is network-enabled (wired or wireless, I don’t care either way), and has duplex scanning and printing, with a document feeder for the scanner, and costs less than a 10/22. I thought this guy
My use case is that I’d drop the giant stack of papers my insurance company sends me* in the document feeder, hit a button, and a PDF magically appears on my server. That’s why the duplex scanning bit is important: I get lots of double-sided documents I need to scan.
So, anybody got one?
*I get these things electronically when possible, but even then it’s a pain to go to 37 different websites to get all the documents that regularly come to my physical mailbox.
I find it incredibly unlikely that a brother product has gone unsupported for “anything past XP”. Make, model, please.
Seriously, help is not that far away.
So I went to go get the link to the page on Brother’s site that says windows 7 drivers are unavailable, and now it says they are available from Windows Update.
So that’s happy.
But I’m still looking for a cheap duplex scanner that’s network-enabled.
That’s good. Brother is a big company, with lots of good products. They are definitely within the group of products that MS targets for support when it comes to drivers. Good luck on your search.
For a scanner, we use this: http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/peripherals/scanners/scansnap/scansnap-s1500.html
Drop papers in, hit button, duplexed searchable .pdf’s get created (duplexed in that it scans both sides of a page with a single pass, not actual duplexing).
It also comes with a piece of software that lets you organize the .pdf’s using whatever hierarchical system you would like. You can pick and choose what storage space on the network they get saved to.