AppleInk Magazine

Moving from WD My Book RAID to Drobo beyond RAID

Around two year ago I purchased a Western Digital My Book 1TB RAID disk as my primary Time Machine backup disk. The drive hummed along nicely until a couple of months after the warranty ran out and then the menu bar item started to tell me there was a problem and I should contact Western Digital support.

I dutifully called WD support and they seemed not only to have no idea about the message I was receiving but also seemed to have very little knowledge regarding their Mac OS X software. I tried several times and phone calls to determine the cause of the error but finally just gave up in frustration.

A few months after the first message the WD menu bar application reported that one of the drives in the RAID pair had failed. I opened the drive, which was no easy feat, and removed the failed drive. I carefully researched the part number and ordered a replacement drive from eBay. When the replacement drive arrived I put everything back together and started it up. The WD Drive Manager software reported the rebuild failed on the second drive.

Wary of WD support I contacted them again and asked what could be wrong. The support agent asked me for serial numbers of the failed drive and the new drive and then suggested that I needed to reformat the new drive and zero out the data.

Since the only enclosure I had was the WD Raid enclosure I asked how to do that. The support agent answered that it could not be done using the enclosure and I had install the new drive inside my Mac and zero it out then remove it from my Mac and put it into the enclosure.

I responded that I was using a laptop and there was no way for me to install the 3.5′ SATA drive inside the laptop to zero it out. His reply was too strange to imagine so I’ll quote him here:

“Can you please connect the drive to a desktop PC or Mac and then zero it out? Maybe from a friend’s computer. For instructions on how to zero the drive on a Windows computer, please visit the link below”

In other words WD support was suggesting I ask a friend if I could take their computer apart to install a drive and zero it out. I have to say I was totally amazed by this suggestion.

Instead of taking apart a friends computer, and hoping it had SATA connections I went back to eBay and purchased for $7 a USB SATA enclosure. When the enclosure arrived I inserted the new drive, connected it to my MacBook and used the Disk Utility to do a low level format. When that was done I inserted the zeroed drive back into the WD enclosure and again it reported that the rebuild had failed.

Since a couple of weeks had passed and I has pressed another USB drive into service to have redundant backups and the WD Raid was still not working I gave up.

Its clear to me now that WD Raid works only until the first failure and then you may as well throw it in the garbage (which is what I have done).

I went back to eBay and located a Drobo enclosure for a reasonable price and ordered it. The Drobo arrived two days later and I installed the new WD drive I had purchased, as well as the “failed” WD drive that I had removed and the Drobo happily accepted them and told me everything was working just fine.

I connected the WD raid, with the one good drive and all my data, to the Firewire 400 port and copied all the data to the Drobo. Then I removed the good drive from the WD Raid and installed it in the Drobo.

Now I have a Drobo enclosure with all my data and 3 working WD drives. I have ordered a couple of more drives from eBay (needless to say they are *not* Western Digital drives) and when they arrive I plan to replace the failed WD drive (just in case it really is failed) with a new drive and fill the remaining Drobo slot with the other new drive.

Just for fun I pulled one of the Drobo drives, reformatted it, and put it back in and everything worked flawlessly.

There was one issue with the Drobo and that was that I needed to create a sparse bundle that was 2x the size of my MacBooks internal drive on the Drobo to limit the size of the Time Machine backup. It would be “nice” if this could be done automatically by the Drobo utility but it was a pretty simple job to do manually.

On to my recommendation for a Mac OS X backup drive. Don’t waste your money on a Western Digital RAID drive that you will need to throw out at the first sign of trouble, instead spend a little bit more and go for a Drobo. If something happens with my Drobo to change my mind I’ll be sure to let you know.

Throw my iPad from the plane

I live near Vancouver, BC, Canada. Vancouver is not a huge city like LA or New York but its not a small city either. Several million people live in the Metro Vancouver area.

I was looking to buy an iPad and when I took a 3 day vacation to Las Vegas I though I’d drop in at the Apple store and pick one up. Well as most of you already know the iPad is in short supply and over those 3 days I dropped in at the Las Vegas Apple store 3 times and each time they were out of stock.

So I returned home and waited for Apple to open up the Canada store to iPad pre-orders.  When they, finally, did open the online store for pre-orders,   I placed my order (around 12:30 am on that day) and waited for the iPad to ship.

Finally on May 25, the iPad shipped from China using FedEx and I was told I should have it by the 28th. I even got a nice tracking number from FedEx so that I could watch the iPad on its travels.

Then, yesterday, I got this email from Apple:

Thank you for your iPad order.

Your iPad is currently in transit, however, FedEx has
informed us that, due to a flight delay, your package
will not deliver on May 28th as planned. We are closely
tracking your order and working with FedEx to deliver it
as soon as possible. FedEx will make every effort to deliver
your iPad on Saturday, May 29th.

If you have any questions, please call us at 1-800-676-2775,
from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 7 a.m. to
4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Pacific time.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Thanks again,
The Apple Store

While I admit I was disappointed I thought maybe I could click on that tracking number provided by FedEx and see where my iPad was stuck.  So I did and I got this very strange result:

May 28, 2010 12:30 AM - Arrived at FedEx location - MEMPHIS, TN
May 27, 2010 3:11 PM - Departed FedEx location - ANCHORAGE, AK
May 27, 2010 3:39 AM - Departed FedEx location - MEMPHIS, TN
May 27, 2010 12:26 AM - Arrived at FedEx location - MEMPHIS, TN
May 26, 2010 5:37 PM - In transit - ANCHORAGE, AK
May 26, 2010 3:03 PM - Departed FedEx location - ANCHORAGE, AK
May 26, 2010 1:26 PM - Arrived at FedEx location - ANCHORAGE, AK
May 26, 2010 8:18 PM - In transit - SHENZHEN CN
May 26, 2010 7:35 PM - In transit - SHENZHEN CN
May 26, 2010 12:06 AM - Left FedEx origin facility - SHENZHEN CN
May 25, 2010 8:41 PM - Picked up - SHENZHEN CN

I was pretty surprised to see that the flights between Anchorage and Memphis appeared to be running on schedule and that my iPad appeared to be on each one, traveling back and forth between the two cities.  If you take a look at a Map you will notice something interesting about Anchorage, Vancouver, and Memphis and that is that Vancouver is between the two points.

My advice to FedEx ?

On your next flight over Vancouver, throw my iPad from the plane.

—– Update —-

So, like all iPad purchasers, I was more than a little miffed that I had pre-ordered and people who had not were walking in to retail stores and getting their iPads before me.  After all, what’s the point in pre-ordering if I could have just gone to the mall and picked one up.

So I called FedEx and they told me the facility at the airport was closed, they did not know if they would be delivering on Saturday, but I could call back at 11 a.m. and perhaps arrange to go and pick up my iPad.

Not the kind of service I was expecting from Apple or FedEx.

Around 8 p.m. I decide to check, yet again the FedEx tracking site, and to my surprise it had been updated and indicated my iPad was on a FedEx vehicle for delivery.  At 9 p.m. the door bell rang and there stood a FedEx driver with my iPad in hand for delivery.

May 28, 2010 9:49 PM - Delivered
May 28, 2010 7:56 PM - On FedEx vehicle for delivery
May 28, 2010 6:53 PM - At local FedEx facility
May 28, 2010 6:32 PM - At dest sort facility - VANCOUVER, BC
May 28, 2010 11:19 AM - Delivery exception - MISSISSAUGA, ON

A few online sites indicated that people who complained to Apple got an average of $50 in swag or discounts for the delay.  But as my FedEx driver said: “Most people are happy once they get the delivery” and while I don’t give Apple or FedEx any points for delivering 12 hours late (I do give extra points to the FedEx driver) I am indeed happy to have my iPad.

Will Apple fail again?

There was a time when Apple had 20% of the desktop computer market. But something went very wrong. That something was the closed nature of the Mac platform. When Apple, already left for dead by many, switched from the closed system to the open Unix system foundation of Mac OS X and embraced open standards the turnaround began for Macintosh computers. When Apple further moved to Intel Architecture CPUs the Macintosh gained additional traction.  Apple is by no means a big player in the computer market, but they are also no longer on life support.

Then something really interesting happened. Apple decided it had lost the desktop computer battle and moved on to green field opportunities defining the iPod universe. Again Apple started out closed with DRM protected tracks and was on the road to failure as open competitors gained market share.  The solution was, once again,  for Apple to open up to non-DRM protected tracks (so that people can convert tracks to MP3 — why Apple refuse to sell tracks in MP3 format is still an amazing and strange story in and of itself).  Had Apple not made this vital course correction the iTunes music business would have eventually failed.

So Apple expanded to iPhone, another closed system with only Apple Apps. Apple was a niche player providing little challenge to the dominant phone players.  So once again Apple changed course and began to open up the iPhone platform.  By opening the platform they attracted thousands of independent developer who in turn created thousands of Apps, and the platform became a success.  There is no question that the App ecosystem is the reason for the success of the iPhone OS as a platform.

But now Apple have decided they need to control the content. They banned thousands of previously allowed Apps. They reject Apps and provide no reason for the rejections. In a word they are biting the hand that feeds them. Developers are turning away from Apple, first a few, now a few hundred, and the tide is moving out on Apple as developers feel the sting of unjustified rejection.

On the other side the Open Source Google Android based market place is growing. Developers are free to invest, innovate, and sell without the fear of being rejected for no reason.

Will Google be Apple’s mobile Microsoft?

Is Apple falling back on the old closed ways? Will Apple alienate enough developers to damage its platform? Only time will tell if Apple will figure this one out in time to save itself or if it is going to fall back on its old closed and self destructive pattern. If Apple does fail again it will be because they lack the vision to understand that, as with everything, independent developers lead to success and in order for that to happen they need to be and remain independent.

If Apple controlled the Applications on Mac OS X the same way they control them on iPhone / iPod / iPad the Macintosh would be dead within 2 years.

With the unjustified rejection of thousands of mobile Apps, Apple is again on the path to yet one more titanic failure - we see the iceberg in Apple’s path - the question is will Apple see it in time to change course, once again, and save itself from the certain disaster of its chosen path?

Converting YouTube Video to DVD

I was recently asked what is the easiest way to convert a YouTube video to DVD for playback on a standard component DVD player.

It was an interesting question and something that I thought a lot of people may be interested in doing.

First you need to download the YouTube video to your computer. It turns out its actually pretty easy to download YouTube videos using Safari. These are the steps you need to follow to download the video:

1. Launch Safari
2. Go to YouTube and start playing the video
3. Press Apple-Option-a to open the Safari activity window
4. Locate the video file, its the large one that is growing
5. Double click the video file and Safari will start a download
6. At this point you can close the playing YouTube window
7. Wait for the download to finish
8. Click the magnifying glass to find the downloaded video in the Finder

The second thing you need to do is install Perian from www.perian.org which allows you to play flash video just in case the downloaded file is a .flv file.

The third thing you need to do is convert the downloaded video to DVD. There are lots of programs that will do this step and  I use iVCD from www.mireth.com.

You should know that Mireth Technology is one of our site sponsors, but they did not pay anything for this article.

To convert the downloaded video to DVD using iVCD you need to do this:

1. Launch iVCD
2. Create a new DVD project
3. Drag in the video you downloaded from YouTube
4. Click the button named Convert+Image+Burn

Using the default settings of iVCD you can burn up to 2 hours of video onto a single layer DVD so you can download several YouTube videos and drag them into iVCD before doing the Convert+Image+Burn step.  If you want to get fancy and use the iVCD Expert Settings to reduce the bit rate from its default of 7500 to something like 3000 you can get 4 hours of video on a single layer DVD.  Another, really nice, thing about using iVCD with multiple movie files is that iVCD automatically makes each video a new DVD chapter.

And that the whole thing. You will end up with a DVD that you can play in your component DVD player.  I told you it was easy.

MacBook Pro with a Blank Screen and flashing Sleep LED

Yesterday my Macbook Pro, which has already had the logic board replaced twice due to the NVIDIA GPU fiasco, died again.

The death was spectacular, I woke the MacBook Pro from sleep and the screen was overwritten several times, getting progressively darker. It was very similar to the Kernel Panic screen except the message telling me I needed to restart my computer never appeared.

Having the experience of the NVIDIA problem I thought this was a third NVIDIA failure so I held down the power button to shut down the computer and tried to restart in target disk mode.

Unfortunately, the computer did not restart (as it had with the previous failures). The screen was blank, there was no start up chime, and the sleep LED would blink 3 times, then stay off, then blink 3 times, in an endless pattern.

Consulting the Internet one can find dozens of stories that are similar with solutions varying between resetting the PRAM and having the logic board replaced. In other words the Internet, in this case, was useless.  The problem could be anything.

The important thing to note about this kind of failure is how soon in the start up process it occurs. Because the screen does not load with an image and the start up chime does not sound the failure is occurring really early in the start up process which means it is a hardware fault of some kind.

The fault occurred so soon that I could not use any of the standard solutions, I could not reset the PRAM, I could not boot from CD or DVD, I could not boot into open firmware.

So I suspected RAM as the culprit. I remove the MacBook Pro from power, took out the battery, opened the memory door, and removed the two RAM sticks. Then I put the first one removed back into the slot which the second one had been in, I put the battery back in leaving the memory door off for now, and restarted the computer.

The MacBook leaped back to life.

It was almost too easy. I’ve never had a RAM stick fail, ever, so I found this a most peculiar failure. I shut the computer down and installed the second RAM stick. The essential difference being the RAM sticks were in the opposite slots from when the problem originally occurred. Then I restarted and once again the MacBook came to life.

My theory is that this is a thermal problem and that with the constant heating and cooling of the MacBook Pro, which gets hot enough to cook eggs, one RAM stick or the other had worked itself slightly loose and the act of removing them and re-seating them was enough to fix the problem.

So the prospect a $1000 logic board replacement or total computer replacement, which many people have done with similar problems, could be avoided it you first try a simple swap of your RAM sticks.

As a post script, I don’t trust the two original RAM sticks, I know its irrational since as I said before I’ve never had one fail, so I replaced them. It turns out I could upgrade from the two 1 GB sticks to two 2 GB sticks for $100. I doubled my RAM and got some piece of mind.

The Magic Mouse Is A Welcome Update

For years Apple users have been at the mercy of the Apple Mighty Mouse.  The Mighty Mouse has an abismal scroll wheel (nub), awful side buttons,  cheap plastic feel, and extremely high failure rate.  So poor in quality is the Mighty Mouse that when a new Macintosh was unpacked in our office the first thing we did was replace the Mighty Mouse with a $20 bottom of the line 3 button Microsoft Mouse.

Now comes the Magic Mouse.

At first glance it appears sleek and well designed.  Like it belongs with a Macintosh.  At first touch it feels solid, gone is the feel of cheap plastic.  Could this be the mouse that you would expect from Apple ?

Setup was not as simple as I would have liked.  The bluetooth pairing went well enough but none of the magic worked.  No gestures were recognized at all.  So I did a quick check for a system update, downloaded and installed all the latest updates for the Mac Mini test bed and restarted.  Still no joy.  The gestures did not work.

This was frustrating.

After a quick Yahooing I discovered there was a wireless mouse update that was required to make the magic work.  Strange that the automatic system update had not found it.  I went to Apple’s support site and found the update, downloaded it,  installed it, and restarted for a second time.

You can find the software updates here
Wireless Mouse Software Update 1.0 for Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6)

Wireless Mouse Software Update 1.0 for Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.8)

The System Preference is bloated, for some bizarre reason Apple decided to take movies of the Magic Mouse in action and embed them into the System Preference.  Which explains the huge download size for the update.  Clearly the marketing people are working overtime on the Magic Mouse.  They must think they really have something here.

And then there was magic.

The gestures work perfectly.  The mouse feels solid.  The mouse works on almost any surface (even the fuzzy arm of my sofa).  The mouse tracks wonderfully.

So yes Elizabeth there is a Santa.  And if you are very, very lucky, Santa will bring you a Magic Mouse and your Mighty Mouse can be relegated to the bin.

As for the marketing people working overtime and the bloated System Preference, this time the marketing folk may be on to something and this time they are forgiven with the advice to the engineering folks to make the next Magic Mouse update without the embedded movies.

Mac Mini Snow Leopard Server

For several years we have been running a Mac Mini Client OS, which we have customized with additional software, as a server.  In fact the last time you read a post on this site it would have been served by that Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.2.

In October Apple quietly introduced the Mac Mini Snow Leopard server.  This machine is essentially a Mac Mini with 2TB of hard disk space and no optical drive bundled with Snow Leopard server.  Needless to say we had been considering upgrading the Mini Server running Mac OS X 10.2 and this was the push we needed to make the move.

Setting up Snow Leopard has resulted in a few issues that we needed to work around and at least one issue for which there is no work around.

Lets deal with the issue that cannot be solved.  We were sharing a DYMO Labelwriter 400 printer on the Mac OS X 10.2 client and that does not work on Mac OS X 10.6 server.  So the labelwriter has been connected to a machine running Mac OS X 10.5 Client and is being shared on that machine.  We did contact DYMO Support and their response was simply that the Labelwriter sharing is not supported on Mac OS X 10.6 server.

Now on to the problems that had to be worked around.

We have two other printers that have CUPS drivers and we tried to share them using a combination of LPR/Bonjour sharing.  For some reason, which we have yet to diagnose, the printers would constantly pause and nothing we could do would keep them printing.  The workaround has been to configure them using Windows SMB sharing and adding a Printing user so that SMB authentication can be used to access the shared printers.  Its not as nice as LPR/Bonjour but its an easy and acceptable workaround.  It did require us to upgrade all of our print clients to at least Mac OS X 10.5 but we had been meaning to do that anyway.

The Mini Server is connected to the Internet using PPP0E and a static IP address.  It is also connected to an airport network that has Internet access.  By default the Airport interface was configured as the default gateway (although that is not what we intended) and that caused mail routing to fail.  After some digging we discovered that the assignment of the default gateway is done by setting the Service Order in the Network System Preference. Once we set the Ethernet ahead of the Airport everything worked nicely.

When we configured the Firewall we opted to enable the Advanced Option known as Stealth Mode.  This, as it turned out, was a big mistake as it resulted in a sudden and dramatic slow down in the Server Administration application.  What used to take seconds to configure was suddenly taking minutes.  Of course we didn’t, at the time, know the cause of the problem.  After some searching on the Apple hosted Snow Leopard user Discussion board we found the answer, turned off Stealth Mode, and performance returned to normal.

Finally, when configuring the Domain Name service, a typo resulted in our main site having a non-existent host configured as the mail exchanger.  This went unnoticed until the DNS error was propagated and mail stopped working.  It would be “nice” if the DNS configuration front end provided a warning if it could not find the mail exchange host.

The ftp server provide seems lacking.  We are using it for now but were using PureFTPd on the Mac OS X 10.2 system and may yet switch to it on Mac OS X 10.6.

Some customized software that we use failed to execute and had to be re-compiled which means we had to install the developer tools.

Other things went very well, MySQL and Web Services function perfectly and are very fast.

There are more things that we will try in the coming weeks but for now the transition from OS X 10.2 to OS X 10.6 server has been completed and we are quite happy to be in the position of having our new Mac Mini Server.

Apple Store Wall Adapter Mistake

Recently a collegue lost the “duck head” wall adapter off his Powerbook adapter brick.  Misplacing the wall adapter is a common problem for powerbook users so you would think a quick trip to the Apple Store to pick up a replacement would be a simple task.

Well it seems the folks at the Apple Store have different ideas.  They told my collegue that Apple do not sell replacement wall adapters for the power bricks and he would have to purchase a brand new adapter for $99.

Well hold on.  What kind of advice is that from an Apple Genius.  Either the Genius is not so smart as Apple would like us to believe or something untoward is happening here.  Either way its not a good scene man !

Being ever helpful I went online to checkout the Apple Online Store.  And sure enough they don’t sell a single wall adapter replacement.  They do however sell a Apple World Travel Adapter Kit which include 6 wall adapters that directly support outlets in North America, Japan, China, United Kingdom, Continental Europe, Korea, Australia, and Hong Kong.  The price for this kit is only $39.  That is a $60 savings over the price quoted to my collegue at the Apple Store.

So I picked up the phone, called the Apple Store and explained to the Genius that my collegue had lost his wall adapter and asked if the Apple Store sold a replacement.  The Genius told me no, that I would have to purchase a new adapter and that it would cost $99.  The same mistake twice by two different Apple Store employees ?  I don’t think so.

So I asked the Genius about the $39 Apple World Travel Adapter Kit and if one of the adapters in that kit would work.  Incredibly he told me he didn’t think so and that I would need an adapter, adapter.  He did volunteer that if it didn’t work it had a 14 day return policy even if it was opened.  So I read, quoted to him verbatim from the web site,  the line above about the Apple World Travel Adapter Kit supporting North American adapters directly.  Still he hedged and said he didn’t think so.

I thanked him, hung up, and did a quick google search for “Apple Duck Head Wall Adapter” and found dozens of companies selling the adapter for prices varying between $4 and $30.  Here are a couple of examples:

http://www.compuvest.com/Desc.jsp?iid=820198&CJAID=10547627&CJPID=2585066&advsite=onetime

http://www.powermax.com/parts/show/apl-1pk-652-1000

The moral of the story, if you lose your duck head wall adapter don’t go to the Apple Store unless you want to pay a significant premium for the support of an Apple Genius, and some really bad advice.

Instead spend 5 minutes doing a web search, save yourself $90, and use it for a good cause.

Sticky Trackpad Button Issues

One day while you are using your Macbook you may find that the trackpad button feels less responsive.  You will find that you really need to push it to get it to click and you will find that if feels really spongy.

You may think something has wedged itself between the casing and the trackpad and no matter how you try to clean it - and believe me you will find a lot of advice online regarding how to clean a sticky trackpad button - nothing solves the problem.

It turns out you are not alone with the sticky track pad button and it also turns out the trackpad is fine.

The problem is that the MacBook battery is defective and has started to swell.  At first the swelling is subtle but in a few days it will become more and more swollen.  You need to remove the battery from your MacBook as soon as possible.

This will make your trackpad button feel sticky

Do this:

1. Connect the Powerbook to the AC Adapter
2. Make sure the display is closed
3. Turn the Powerbook over and slide the two latches on the battery up so that it pops out
4. Turn the Powerbook right side up and continue using it so long as the AC Adapter is connected

Now keep an eye on the battery, look closely where the seems join, over the next few days and weeks the battery will expand.

This problem is a known defect with the battery.  But Apple are not jumping up and down to replace the battery, they would rather that you spend $120 to purchase a new battery.  So you need to be persistent, in fact insistent, but remain calm and relaxed, when you take the old battery back to Apple and ask for a free replacement.

Even if your computer is out of the 1  year warranty you can get Apple to replace it for free.  You need to make sure you don’t become rude and play up the quality of the Macbook and how surprising this defect is, but also be firm in maintaining that Apple should replace if for free.

With the $120 you save you can buy yourself an iPod.

Epson Artisan 800 Auto Duplexer Installation and Setup

After my disappointment that the auto duplexer had to be purchased separately I shelled out the $40 (including shipping) to order it from the Epson online store.  When it arrived, the hardware installation was a snap, literally.  The instructions are clear, and the hardware installs easily.  I even forgot to turn the printer off (not something I recommend) and things worked well.

Its the software

Epson make nice hardware but the software leaves a lot to be desired.  After installing the auto duplexer it is not recognized until you launch the Epson Print Utility 3.  It would seem a simple matter for Epson to do that automatically when you choose the auto duplexer option but they don’t.  It is documented and easy to do but still something better left to a computer than a human.

Having launched the Print Utility 3, and having found it sees the duplexer, I was surprised to find I still could not print using it since no running applications were aware of the duplexer being there.  Quitting and relaunching did not solve the problem.  Finally I restarted the computer and voila the auto duplexer is now recognized by applicaitons.

The problem is they still can’t print using it and the message displayed is very cryptic and all but useless.  The problem it turns out is that you need to choose US Letter Paper, but it was already selected, so its a catch 22.  The solution is to choose A4 paper and then choose US Letter paper (and I suppose if you are in Europe to do the opposite).  Then, and only then, can you print using the auto duplexer.

Summary

These are the steps that you need to follow:

1. Install the hardware
2. Launch the Epson Print Utility 3
3. Choose your printer from the list
4. Click the Printer and Option information button and make sure it says Duplexer Installed
5. Restart your computer
6. Launch the Application from which you wish to print
7. Using either the Print or Page Setup (it varies by application) menu choose A4 (if you are in Europe US Letter) paper size
8. Using either the Print or Page Setup menu choose US Letter (if you are in Europe A4) paper size

And now the Auto Duplexer will work.

Epson should be able to do better.  The buggy software could easily turn people off of what is otherwise a decent printer at a reasonable price.