Vista 64-bit: Apple 1, Microsoft 0
I am sitting here with an incredulous look on my face because that’s the way I feel. Today I have been working on the evaluation of the HP tx2000 notebook which is running 64-bit Vista Ultimate due to the AMD processors. Everything has worked fine so far with the exception of two niggling things that have driven me crazy. I now know the two problems have the same root cause and it is the 64-bit version of Vista.
First up, I installed OneNote 2007, my main Tablet PC application and since the tx2000 is a Tablet I had to get it working. It installed fine but I noticed after that there was no Send to OneNote virtual printer installed like there should be. I’ve seen that before so I uninstalled OneNote 2007, rebooted and reinstalled it. Nope. No virtual printer again. Now I use this virtual printer so much on my Tablets that is is always set as my default printer so I can easily print things right into OneNote so not having this is a big deal to me. I did some minor investigation but didn’t turn up anything so I moved on to my second issue of the day.
My Canon printer is plugged directly into my Airport Extreme router so that everyone on my home network can print to it. The only caveat is that Windows-based PCs on the network have to have the Apple utility Bonjour installed which handles the network printer. I have used this for months and it works great on every PC in the home but it didn’t work with the tx2000. Bonjour installed fine and once running it saw the Canon printer but couldn’t actually talk to it. I did a bunch of different things but nothing worked so I couldn’t print from the HP. It turns out it’s related to the OneNote problem above.
I turned back to finding a solution to the Send to OneNote missing printer and another Google search turned up something very surprising. First of all the answer to my problem was found, you’ll laugh about this, right here on jkOnTheRun. It seems that Kevin posted a few months back that the Send to OneNote printer will not install on 64-bit Windows, neither XP nor Vista. What? It’s a Microsoft operating system and OneNote is a Microsoft application so that can’t be right! Au contraire! According to this MS employee the problem is that the Microsoft Office Document Imaging tools don’t work on 64-bit Windows so the Send to OneNote printer won’t work (nor install) either. You’ve got to be kidding me! According to Microsoft, better sit down before you read this:
CAUSE
This behavior occurs because the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer printer driver is not installed on a computer that is running a 64-bit operating system.STATUS
Thisbehavior is by design.
So I’m not only screwed but this was Microsoft’s intent according to that statement! The saddest part is the recommendation by the above employee:
In the meantime if you really need this feature it is recommended that you run x86 and sorry for the inconvenience.
So forego our latest and greatest OS and go back to 32-bit because our own software doesn’t work with it by design.
This 64-bit failure got me to thinking about the Apple Bonjour problem so I went back to the Apple site where I downloaded the free utility and found that lo and behold there is a 64-bit Windows version of Bonjour produced by Apple. I installed it and immediately was able to print to my Canon printer! So Apple 1, Microsoft 0 with 64-bit Windows support! Actually I think Microsoft’s score should be a negative value. I’m going to go punch a wall, back later.
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James,
There are a lot of these things with 64 bit windows. For example, the Analysis Cubes for Ms Dynamics GP run fine on 64 bit machines but the have a 32 bit installer so they won’t install. Go figure.
Mark
well Vista is all about wow, as in wow, why does their 64 bit support stink so much. lol
Hi, first time poster, but I couldn’t resist after reading this blog entry.
I totally understand, I’ve been running Vista Ultimate 64-bit on my main development rig for about a year now, the 32bit version has been running on my X60 Tablet since beta with NO problems (granted my X60 has 2GB but still)
Anyway, I run into 64-bit Vista issues ALL THE TIME. It’s NOT just drivers, but 64-bit is just ‘unsupportable’. Most apps I want won’t work with it, and yes, I’ve had MSDN posts replied by MS staff with the whole “by design…” cr*pola…
You know, I bought the iPhone 6 months ago – it was my first EVER Apple product (hated Macintoshs and G4 / G5′s etc…) but I’m REALLY turned onto Apple stuff – my next rig WILL be the Mac Pro, and in the interim I’m looking for an iMac for my main desktop.
If they’d make a tablet with decent handwriting recog (InkWell SUCKS bigtime compared to Vista’s handwriting recog / TIP) then I’d switch there too..
MS have got TOO big, and TOO many departments not talking to each other – or one person overviewing everything. And as a developer, the fudges that each dept make to their .Net framework is unreal! It’s like NO-ONE looks at this stuff before release other than the guy that wrote it.
Sure people rant about Steve Jobs being a tyrant and weird etc… (and I agree, he creeps me out abit) but damn, this sorta industry NEEDS to have someone with a vision in charge making these decisions.
MS have got too carried away with $$$ and really need to pull their finger out and buy a clue…
’cause until Surface comes along (with the exception of my tablets) – MS have lost me.
Great article, your site carries alot of ‘weight’ out here in TCP/IP land, so maybe someone from the MS beast will take note?
Yeah, right.
Oh, my. Guess I’ll know what to look for when the review unit I’m testing arrives tomorrow.
Seriously?! You can’t print to one note with 64bit vista. Wow I dodged a bullet there, I bought a 32 bit version of vista the other day by accident and was going to return it. But now I’ll keep it, I really really need that print to onenote function.
That sucks, Sorry to hear about that, but atleast you just saved me there.
I agree that it’s ridiculous that Microsoft 64 bit Vista has so many Microsoft things that won’t work with it. What I don’t understand is the statement about your unit running 64 bit Vista due to the AMD processor. Could you unpack that a bit.
I have the TX1000 with the same AMD processor family, the 32 bit version and Print to ONeNOte, which is my default printer, as you describe. Who needs the stupid 64 bit hassle?
A year and a half later Vista is still having problems…. pathetic. Anyone else think Vista is the successor to Windows ME? O’ Windows 7, please save us.
To be fair, the only tangible reason why anyone would want to run 64bit Windows, XP or Vista, is for better handling of beautifully insane amounts of RAM. I’m talking about anything over 4GB.
I’m all for maxing out at 8GB and above but I don’t think I’ve seen any tablet PCs, or any portable that you’d want to run OneNote on, support that much RAM.
I may sound like a Windows apologist but I’m not. I’ve a cousin who couldn’t get iTunes to see any of the movies on his computer to sync with his iPhone. He was running Vista 64 Ultimate on a HP portable with an AMD processor and 2.5GB of RAM. A switch back to Vista 32 fixed the problem, and more importantly, he didn’t lose anything by way of performance with Vista 32.
I like Vista, especially the Aero interface, though the UAC can get annoying, and I have never faced any problems with XP or Vista that I couldn’t figure out a solution for but the two computers I use the most are a Mac mini and a PowerBook G4. We have two other Windows XP portables, as well as two Vista portables, a Vista desktop and a XP desktop in this household.
As a side note, I’ve even got Vista to run on a 800MHz Via C3 with 1GB of RAM. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked fine for an email machine. :)
This is hardly Vistas fault as everyone seems to be pointing at. It has to have 64bit drivers, it always has and always will because… it’s a 64bit OS!
The people to blame here aren’t the developers of Vista but the developers of OneNote and Canon, they have had a 64bit platform to develop for since XP x64 and they have done nothing I’m sure they would say the ‘market for x64 drivers isn’t economical’ or something.
I’ve been running Vista x64 Ultimate since the beginning of February and it has been very good, much snappier on some tasks compared to x86 and those x64 drivers seem to be more reliable, probably because they weren’t recoded XP drivers with little effort put in to improve them. I’ve been lucky as HP are pretty good at releasing updated printer drivers and there was x64 drivers for my HP LaserJet 1022n.
I don’t use OneNote on my x64 Desktop but to on my x86 Vista Ultimate Toshiba M400 TabletPC
Bonjour is one sweet utility which just works.
My Canon is shared out on an airport express and all my windows devices can happily print away.