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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